About the pricing of WiiU, here is my educated guess...

One plausible approach is "the cost approach" since firms usually do not aim to make profit from selling the main console, so there is an absolute correlation with its price and cost.

In terms of manufacturing, WiiU will definitely cost MORE than Wii, due to the incorporated touch screen gamepad... It will also cost more than an Xbox 360, since Xbox360 didn't have any new technology in it except for its relatively cheap CPU... The basic model didn't even have a Hard drive, and it used mostly off the shelve components... WiiU, I believe will cost slightly more than an Xbox360 to produce due to the touchscreen gamepad, which cannot cost less than $50-$100 (which is way more than a regular gamepad). However, it will still cost less than a PS3....

Now, the costs might come down by time, but if nintendo doesn't want to loose money with each WiiU sold, they have to price it between the introductory price of X360 and PS3... But of course, we know $299 and $399 are rather important pricepoints, and even Wii was priced at $249 at launch. Nintendo has no plans to discontinue the original Wii, and they announced that WiiU is addressed to a different audience for a reason! And a mere $50 difference is not enough to justify such an announcement.... Given all that, it shouldn't price any less than $299, and they would loose too many sales after $399, so it can't be more than this either, which is also true to their history.

In Short my best bet is between $299 and $399 for WiiU... I'd tend to think that it will start off with $399 and drop to $299 after a period, while this period depends on how Wii and WiiU perform and their opponents (namely MS, and Sony) do/react.