I've had my Switch for a few days now, certainly long enough to form some opinions, so I thought I'd lay them out.

Firstly, I will be clear: I am not a console gamer, and I think the pissing match between console horsepower is hilarious when my last-gen PC graphics card alone possesses more power than any of them. I don't say that as some PC Master Race arrogance, but rather to make a point: horsepower is NOT what makes a good console. So you won't hear me complaining that once again Nintendo has built a console that pumps out fewer FLOPS than an Xbox One despite hitting the market halfway though this console generation. Because that doesn't matter. I have more games for my Wii U than all my other non-Nintendo consoles combined (maybe even all my other set-top consoles INCLUDING Nintendo combined) and it has all the horsepower of a 2CV running on one cylinder. Nintendo's first party titles and lots of indie titles work great on weaker hardware, and those are the reasons people buy Nintendo consoles, so the slightly diminished processing power versus the big set-top consoles is irrelevant.

With that out of the way, let's talk about the Switch.

First off: THAT BUILD QUALITY.
DAMN, is this a finely-assembled machine. Steve Jobs would be proud. But it even surpasses Apple levels of build quality because it manages to be sleek, solid, and sexy while still being completely livable. It's something you can hand to your 7 year old nephew and not worry about. It has visible screws (Nintendo tri-wing, of course, but that's no problem for most geeks). The rails for the JoyCons are BEEFY. It has EXACTLY the right amount of heft to it. And even the insides are impressive (check out iFixit's teardown). Such efficient use of space without resorting to ridiculously expensive or repair-hindering methodology. It's a very, very purposeful design, and the form that follows that function is very pleasing.

The console feels fantastic in hand. It's like a Wii U gamepad that went to bootcamp and turned its flab into muscle. It's sleek and hard-edged, but every millimeter of it makes sense.

The Joy Cons are so well-executed, but can't be good at everything. They're very well-sized. I have huge hands, and they feel a little small to me, but not obstructively so. When used in the two-player sideways mode, they're a bit awkward, but quite usable. My brother and I had no issues winning a couple of co-op runs in Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ with the Joy Cons used in that format.
When clipped to the Joy Con Grip, they're just slightly not right. The overall package is too narrow, and the right Joy Con's analog stick is a little bit too low.
What managed to both surprise me, and not surprise me at all, is just how fantastic the Joy Cons work when separated from each-other and the console. Unlike the Wii Remote, which depended on crappy inertial motion sensors and optical receptors for motion tracking (which was, of course, shoehorned into every game), the Joy Cons are basically a normal game controller broken up into two lightweight halves with highly accurate motion tracking built in. What this means in practice is that playing games on the TV from the couch is a MUCH more relaxed experience than with any other controller. You can rest your arms comfortably rather than bringing them together in front of you. It's a really dramatic effect, and one that the Wii missed due to its tech limitations.
I've heard a lot of complaints about the Switch's analog sticks. I have to honestly say: I think they are PHENOMENAL. I have several Xbox One, 360, and PS3 gamepads (in addition to various Wii U, Wii, and GameCube controllers in addition to tons of older console controllers and a bunch of generic bluetooth gamepads) and out of all my controllers, I prefer the Joy Cons' analog sticks. They are small, finely-tuned, with exactly the right spring weight and exactly the right grip size. They require less motion to reach their outer extremes, but feel more granular along the way (in other words, you get a greater resulting range of motion with more accuracy out of less thumb movement). The button click is perfectly tactile but lightly weighted. I really like these controllers a lot. I'm interested in picking up a Switch Pro Controller and I seriously hope its analog sticks are the same (or better, I guess).
The split d-pad on the left Joy Con is a mixed bag. For many games, it is ideal as four separate buttons. But for others, where you want d-pad functionality, it's a little less than perfect. I sometimes switch to the D-pad on my Xbone controller for Afterbirth when I need to trade analog speed inputs for quick precision, but I don't find that as useful on the Switch because of the split buttons. Rocking between directions just doesn't quite work as well as we're used to with cross-shaped D-pads.
My main Joy Con complaint: why isn't the Joy Con grip we get with the console the Charging Grip? This is dumb. But even that's minor; battery life is ridiculously long and they're best used either attached to the console or not attached to anything at all.
Oh, and the wrist strap slide-on things are stupid, pointless, and way too hard to remove.

The OS is great. A huge improvement over the weird tile-based interfaces of the 3DS and Wii U, it feels more like a native touch UI, but does NOT feel like a skin of some generic tablet OS. It's very intuitively designed, and allows for very seamless multitasking and sleep functionality. You can launch between programs, check out the news, change settings, all without interrupting what you're doing. Your game sits happily suspended in the background until you're ready to come back. Really, the only time you need to close it is to launch a different game or visit the shop.

You can talk about it, and it sounds neat, but the first time you do it, the act of taking the console out of the dock and resuming the exact same session of the exact same game without ANY delay is a gamechanger. There's no pausing. No switching modes. You just pick up the console and the game that was on your TV is on the tablet screen instead.

The pricing is fantastic. $300 for a 3/4 Xbox One or PS4 capable machine that fits in your backpack and can be played on the go is HUGE. It's especially obvious when comparing the Switch's pricing to that of gaming-oriented steaming tablets that don't even do their own processing and require a separate computer to do the work. This thing is 100% the same experience on the go, but at a lower screen resolution. That's a big deal. Imagine a handheld Xbox One you could throw in your backpack. That would not cost $300. Portability while maintaining non-mobile, non-portable game quality is a huge tradeoff that could have easily led to a more expensive console. The 3DS and Wii U were both ridiculously overpriced when first launched. Nintendo was very wise to pick the $300 pricepoint. You can't even find the damn things, and they're looking to sell 16 million in the first year of sales. High five, Nintendo. At $300, Nintendo wins, and so do consumers.

The game pricing, on the other hand, sucks. $60 for console games has irked me as long as it's been a thing, this is no exception. But the lack of a pack-in game (even a Wii-Sports style minigame collection) is less forgivable in light of this. And even worse, Nintendo has the gall to call more than one of what should have been pack-in games full-on titles and sell them for full price. ARMS and 1, 2, Switch are both a joke at $60. Not even worth half that, one or both should have come with the console, and even then I probably wouldn't play either more than a handful of times. I hope nobody buys either and Nintendo gets a firm slap in the face for this show of greed.

My only complaint with the physical design is the plastic touchscreen. It WILL scratch. I bought a tempered glass cover for mine and improved the tactile feel of the screen in addition to protecting it.

The display itself is great. The DPI is obviously nowhere near that of my QHD 5.5'' phone, but it's good enough. Certainly a huge step forward from the lego-block 3DS resolution. But, honestly, this isn't a case of "it's not too bad..." but rather a case of "720p is actually the right resolution for this" because even beefy processing hardware has trouble rendering above 1080p, and there are significant battery life gains to be made from stepping back to 720p.

As far as the battery: it holds up fine. I've played Zelda for hours in handheld mode without a low battery warning. Sleep mode battery life is also great, only losing a percent or two over several hours with a game running in the background. I haven't been able to make a dent in the Joy Con battery level.

Other thoughts:

It has real WiFi support, now. There's no more of the older Nintendo consoles' 3-connection limitation that requires you to either suffer without wifi or constantly overwrite one of your existing connections.

It uses bluetooth, but doesn't support bluetooth peripherals. That's disappointing, as I'd love to pair my Sony MBR-1000Xs with it. I can still use the 3.5mm jack, but bluetooth seems obvious.
On the other hand, it does support keyboards over USB (either via the dock or through a USB C adapter direct to the console) for text input.

USB C hubs don't work. But teardowns of the official dock don't show anything obviously proprietary, so I'm curious what it is about the official dock that tells the console it's special.
On the other hand: USB C is a thing! No Nintendo-proprietary charger here. I already have more type-C cables than any other around my house, office, and car thanks to my Android phone. Now, those same chargers do double duty charging my Switch. Fantastic.

Equally great and non-proprietary: support for MicroSD cards for expandable storage.

That fan is QUIET. In a silent room, in docked mode (where the console runs hotter due to being able to draw more amps without stressing the battery) the fan is BARELY audible if it's sitting within a foot or two of your face. Across the room when docked? You'll never ever notice it. And in handheld mode, you could be in a perfectly silent room and never notice a sound, even in an intensive game.

The cartridges are tiny, and have a neat tandem contact layout that's denser than a DS cartridge or SD card--more like a SIM chip or credit card.

"The console feels fantastic in hand. It's like a Wii U gamepad that went to bootcamp and turned its flab into muscle. It's sleek and hard-edged, but every millimeter of it makes sense."

That makes me happy. Iv been on the road now for a while and havent had the chance to get one yet. The biggest worry was that the control would be wierd. Man i cant wait to get home and get one. How was the new Zelda game?

Zelda's very good. I haven't finished it yet, because there's so much to do that's not the main quest, but once I do I'll post a review. As far as my thoughts so far:

The lack of hand-holding is what keeps me coming back. But it's not just "here, be helpless in a virtual world with rules you don't understand." It teaches you slowly and quietly, so that you rarely feel overwhelmed or lost, and when you do it's because YOU (not the game) missed a signal somewhere. I've just been wandering around "aimlessly" but making progress slowly. You can progress the way you want. Do you want to reveal more of the map so peoples' references to locations are more valuable? Do you want to work on Link's strength? Do you want to seek out better equipment? Do you just want to wander and see what you find? Certainly, there are times where I need to achieve something specific, but what's most incredible is that even with quest-marker waypoints turned off, I always know roughly where I need to go for the next step in that task. Trying to get into the Gerudo camp? Well, I've heard this particular town mentioned a couple times, I'll head that way. Oh, wait, I don't know where that town IS yet. Better find the Sheika Tower in that area and reveal the map. But damn, that area's full of tough mobs and COLD. Better go work on heat-protection. And on the way to find peppers and buy warmer clothes, I find a bunch of Shrines and a couple new Stables and run into some NPCs and maybe get killed viciously by a Lynel but that's okay. Then, 5 hours later, I remember that I was going to start working on getting into Gerudo. But what makes all of this work is that, with one exception, none of it feels like busywork. It's just exploring a world in a game and finding out what's there. But you're always gaining something from the time you put in, and you can always change direction or focus, which is why you never feel lost or confused or overwhelmed. Often very ill-equipped or underpracticed, but never that feeling that the game just doesn't make sense.


However, it does make some very stereotypical Nintendo/Zelda mistakes that I find very disappointing.

1: The game STILL feels the need to take camera control away from you when you activate any kind of trigger in a dungeon. It's extremely frustrating and has always been my #1 complaint about 3D Zelda games. I know the switch I just activated opened a door, and I know where that door is (and I probably know this because I hit the switch KNOWING I WANTED THAT DOOR OPEN). Taking the camera away from me for several seconds to show me that I just did what I already know I did is hugely irritating, immersion-breaking, and more than anything it kills the flow of the game while insulting me as a player. Especially in a game that gives me a world and says "figure this out," it comes across as hugely condescending.

2: Some dungeons and shrines involve motion-control based puzzles, which are quite simply inexcusable. This is not a Wii. I am not playing Wii Bowling. Get this s*** OUT OF HERE. Nobody will ever see one of these dungeons and think "Oh, that's so fun, I want to do more of those!" They're tedious, out-of-place, and gimmicky, and they are yet another discordant note in an otherwise beautiful symphony.

3: Many other shrines are "tests of strength" that involve fighting a tediously formulaic but very tough boss. They just get old. And more than that; they impose a false level gate that doesn't fit in this game for the same reasons I've mentioned above. Where the puzzle shrines are "progress agnostic," and I can think my way around them or not, regardless of how well geared or experienced Link may be, the combat shrines are purely based on the number of hearts I have, my skill at dodging (which is very poorly developed due to my choice to focus on exploration so far) and, even worse, the gear I've come equipped with. Which leads me to point #4

4: Weapon "wear" is stupid. It's stupid in every game it has ever appeared in, and it will always be stupid. Any value it adds is offset by orders of magnitude by the drawbacks it introduces, and could be achieved through other, more clever and fun means anyway. Yes, I understand that it forces me to progress through weapons of various strength as the game progresses, and to try different types of weapons against different opponents in different scenarios. But honestly, it actually does exactly the OPPOSITE of encouraging me to try those things. Instead, it creates a golden weapon heirarchy where I never dare use the weapons that are actually good, because I don't want them to break. So I spend the game swapping from low-end weapon to low-end weapon and slowly grinding through monster camps in a kind of hit-dodge-hit-break-switch weapon-dodge-hit-dodge-repeat dance of supreme tedium. Instead of using my ice weapon against fire monsters and my fire weapon against ice monsters and my lightning weapon against particularly well-guarded or quick monsters, I just leave all those in my inventory where they're wasting space because I can't afford to have them break right now. But then if I never use them, it doesn't MATTER if they break, which means those weapons are exclusively for use when there's no other way out of a situation (e.g. element-based Wizrobes or puzzles). This is further detrimental to the concept of loot as reward. Now, when a shrine hands me a particularly excellent weapon, it's like getting nothing at all, because I'm sure not going to waste that weapon on ANYTHING less than a Lynel fight or a dugeon boss. And if it's a fire weapon, that means I'm saving it for an ice Lynel or dungeon boss, which means who the Hell knows when it might eventually become relevant.

So many options...

Grab yourself a decent microSD (I'm using this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072H ... UTF8&psc=1).
I'd also recommend a good glass screen protector (since the Switch has a plastic screen, which makes it very scratch prone). I use this one, though due to the squishiness of the plastic screen it's applied to, my first one did crack. No damage, of course, but it was visible as a hairline, so I replaced it. The second has had no issues and has lasted nearly a year.
As far as games, here's my library currently (sorted by the switch in order of most-recently-played):