I think the Switch will be very successful for several reasons.
Learning from Past mistakes
The Wii controllers were awesome, but their amazingness wasn’t fully realized until Nintendo came out with the MotionPlus version with better tracking a few years in. By then it was too late to make those the standard, there were already a trillion original ones. People had already been disappointed by the less than stellar real aiming and swordplay in Red Steel (which was still a great concept), so some ignored the amazing controls of Metroid Prime 3 and others that were almost as responsive as a true mouse/keyboard setup and more immersive.
The WiiU was a good console, but suffered in the market due to some fatal flaws. Fatal flaw number one - confusing marketing hurdles. Okay, a screen controller is cool. What about my TV? What about multiplayer? How many people knew WiiU could use Wii remotes just by looking at the packaging? How can they communicate on the box how the screen controller and Wiimotes relate to each other? Why should I look at my screen when the same info could just be on the TV? There were a few cool applications like Pikmin, but not many.
The WiiU and the Switch
In many ways, you can see that the Switch is what they wanted the WiiU to be all along, but the tech wasn’t ready yet to make it happen. Tablets were still too expensive and portable chipsets not powerful enough yet. But now, look at the iPhone 7, almost double the graphics performance of the last one. The tech is ready. The portable mode Switch controller is almost the identical size as the WiiU with a better screen. Console gaming that can happen independent of the TV is already an expected convenience for WiiU owners.
Why the Switch is a brilliant move for gamers and business strategy
The Switch is basically the ultimate gaming machine. It adapts to every single gaming scenario that exists today: home theater lone wolfs, mobile, online multiplayer, local multiplayer, LAN parties and eSports events. Their marketing video does an amazing job of communicating exactly what it does and why it matters. It already has 20M views in a week, more than any Nintendo vid ever.
Naysayers have been saying for a while that Nintendo should go software only. In reality, the competition has less reason than ever to make walled garden consoles. Sony and Microsoft console differentiation is becoming increasingly nothing more than exclusive software contracts, exclusive DLC, and deceptive timed advertising delays for one or the other system when a game does end up launching on both. They are both turning into PCs. AAA titles are fewer and far between, and many heritage franchises like Gears and Halo have grown stale.
Nintendo has always been at the forefront of hardware innovation. Shoulder buttons, analog thumb sticks, haptic feedback, motion control, etc. Nintendo continues this tradition with the Switch which actually offers a meaningfully unique experience from a PC. Compare this to PS4 and Xbox, where you can play the same game on PC with the console controller.
The Switch is so smart because it shows that Nintendo is in the process of combining their entire organization into a single ecosystem. This allows them to release more Nintendo titles per year for both home and portable gaming. It also gives 3rd party publishers a larger more lucrative ecosystem to develop for.
I’m just as curious to see the software innovations and improvements Nintendo has in store. Could it be a full-fledged OS? We still don’t know if the screen is touch and if the controllers have motion tracking or not.