Wii was a freak once-in-every-20-years type craze for blue ocean/non-gamers.
I give the Wii a pass also because it's architecture was directly based on the GameCube.
The Wii U is a new architecture built from the ground up. For them to barely be able to outperform a seven year old XBox 360, even with a 6-inch LCD screen on the controller is pretty sad.
I would not be surprised at all if AMD could've given them a much more powerful solution for about the same money, but Nintendo is too hung up on making the system as small as possible on day 1 and wanted a more propietary solution, even though this is generally a turn off to third parties.
Honestly I'd rather they had just taken an old GPU, like a $90 6670 (retail cost, price for Nintendo would likely be much cheaper), modified it a bit for power savings and efficiency, and just thrown that in the box. It would probably in a closed console environment be able to run things like BLOPS2, Arkham City, etc. in 1080p fairly easy.
They spent like several years and likely millions of dollars working on this chip which barely outperforms existing consoles, just to be able to have a chip with a power output of 35 watts instead of say 65-70 watts. Whoopity doo.
