I want to be a pro unarmed guy. However, I don't know how to get there. I know being a Khajiit is important, but is it necessary? I know to get those gloves of the pugilist and get some heavy armor gauntlets. I heard my best bet would be to use Enchanting. Even if I enchant, would unarmed still be viable at say, level 40? What are some figures I could expect? I know my enchanting skill isn't the greatest, but I was enchanting my armors to get me something like +2 to my unarmed damage, which wasn't great :/

Level both, enchanting and alchemy. Then cycle fortifying them to arbitrarily high levels: Then enchant Legendary Daedric Gauntlets with Fortify Hand-to-hand + Arbitrarily High Amount.

With a Khajiit, Fists of Steel perk, best Gauntlets, and the best Unarmed enchants possible, you're still only doing about 86 damage with Unarmed.

Which is alright at lower levels, but at 40 it's not really viable. It's just for a bit of fun really.

Someone posted yesterday that the first perk of one handed effected H2H damage. Is this true?

This was proven to be [censored]

as a nord warrior i just punched a forsworn to death...it took so long,