I just find it strange that Nintendo is suddenly going back to the Game Cube philosophy of "an equal but more powerful console" for a successor. I need to see something else, new and different, to truly believe it.
It's hard to me to believe that they are going to change their philosophy after Wii, Wii U, DS, 3DS and Switch.
There are multiple Factors.
Forst, the nintendo now is a different one then the nintendo back then:
new leadership, big restructuring.
Second: the market changed by a ton. the position mobile took (and kinda removed the space for lower end handhelds), the the return of PC gaming in a big way (even japanese developers are porting stuff like FF, DQ, MH and Persona to PC and PS is porting their first party stuff)
Game Streaming and Game Pass
so having a more expensive/experimental platform seems even more of a list from a value proposition perspective.
Then we should not forget where technology stands currently. the only obvious move to something that was not done yet is AR/VR from nintendos perspective.
But as it stands, there is not a big enough market of developers to support this, if nintendo then cant just have standard games. And it moves away from their promotional strategy (a lot dependent on social media, people playing together, shared experiences)
They will try AR/VR out more in the future. But at the current technology level i feel like they want to ride the switch longer till we get another breakthrough that makes a switch to a different paradigm more feasable.
Also: the Joy cons are already as universal as it gets, since you can expand their functionality (see ringfit and the bend sensor thats in the ring), and if they do a Switch Pro / 2 they can have a better interface (USB 4?) and add 2 screen gameplay back to the table.
There would only a handfull games exist that they cant port reasonably, the ones that relied on the resistive touch for pressure sensitivity (well, there are new ways for that, maybe they add a digitizer to the new switch... i dont think so, but they could, they got way cheaper), and games that relied on the IR emiter (sensor bar) for its core mechanics.
One area where there was a lot of improvement that can be used:
machine learning. and going by what we know, that WILL be in the new one.
The thing is: you can either make interesting new gameplay ideas with it (hard), but if you dont have any ideas...you can use it for graphical improvements. best of both worlds.
Its just not really a new interface if that is what you expect.
But i would hope for a backwards compatible revision of the joy cons.