Bingo. What would have been a creative approach to this would have been finding a way to leverage the 3DS library somehow - the pre-launch rumors that the Switch would accept 3DS cards would have been huge, but I don't think they found a way around the dual-screen issue. Though to be fair, my tablet does fine in vertical orientation with an external controller running DraStic.
I think it'd be okay for most games even with a side by side configuration, with varying different positioning and scaling options.
If Wikipedia is right, 3DS's original dimensions were 3.53" diagonal for top screen and 3.02" for bottom. That works out to only about 3.03x1.82" and 2.42x1.82" (can anyone confirm it was really this small? I have to go grab my 3DS..). Switch @ 6.2" diagonal would be 5.32x3.19".
Scaled to 800x480 the top screen would take up 3.33x2.12", so a bit larger than the original 3DS and I think around the size of n3DS (not the XLs). The bottom screen won't fit scaled the same way, but with a fractional 1.5x scaling would take up 480x360 and 2.0x1.6", a little smaller than the original. In practice I think people won't care that much about the bottom screen because its usage was very secondary, and I think fewer 3DS games moved stuff between the two than DS games because they weren't the same size/aspect ratio.
What do you think they've learned?
I personally don't really see any lessons learned, and, in fact, they're making even more mistakes from WiiU.
At least it's not another respin of Gecko with Flipper jammed in there somewhere. And they've probably abandoned Renesas as a manufacturing partner. Maybe less dependent on lagging Japanese suppliers all around now.
The tech is still a little old, but this time "just" by about 1.5-2 years. 3DS and Wii U were both at least 5 years behind.
The Wuupad was not a good idea, now if they really must have the feature in some game they can do it with multiple Switches without saddling everyone with the additional cost for a feature that rarely rises above an added novelty. If you wanted to move a Wii U to some other place you had to drag the Wuupad around with you, while here you can package everything up in the dock. Not that I think people are really going to move something like this around much.
The split JoyCons look like lousy controllers but at least it supports two players out of the box. It's not like Wii U where they actually included a pack-in game that had couch multiplayer that required a Motion Plus that wasn't bundled with the system.
Actually the whole configuration of Wii U with old Wii controllers and accessories was a mess. Nintendo is giving mixed signals about its intended direction with motion controls, but at least they've got a coherent and easy to manage set of hardware for the purpose.
