Oniyide, Americans were never really into JRPGs to begin with. Final Fantasy was the only franchise that was a big seller. Thanks to Sony's heavy promotion of FFVII, other developers started localizing JRPGs. They didn't put the ad dollars behind their franchises that Sony did with FFVII and they didn't see the same result. So the genre never really got a foothold.
As for people buying PS3's and Wii's assuming they'd get JRPG support, that's stupidly foolish especially given the PS3's launch price, but I could see that being the case because of the PS2. At least initially. However I've owned every Nintendo home console. The last Nintendo home console with good JRPG support was the SNES. The N64 had nothing and the Gamecube only got a handful JRPGs.
