Thank you so much for your help, was finally able to crack it. All though v4l2-ctl lists YUYV as an accepted video format Gstreamer prefers listing the format as YUY2.
Final Working Server Code:
gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! video/x-raw,format=YUY2,width=640,height=480,framerate=30/1 ! videoconvert ! video/x-raw,format=NV12 ! nvvidconv ! 'video/x-raw(memory:NVMM),format=NV12' ! nvvidconv ! 'video/x-raw(memory:NVMM),width=1280,height=720,format=I420' ! nvv4l2h264enc insert-sps-pps=1 idrinterval=15 ! h264parse ! rtph264pay ! udpsink host=<HOST_IP> port=5000 sync=0
For future reference for anyone.
I used the same format of client code as detailed in this example and was able to stream the footage over UDP onto my ACER laptop.
Once again thank you!!