You have to be "cool" on release to be "cool"  -the Wii U will not find the same audience it had for the Wii U as those housewives are now on tablets, and the gamers have left to either the 360 or PS3. 

IP's - you mean the same games that have been given to the market every year for the last decade? Serious gamers have moved past them. Only Nintendo fans are interested in another Mario etc anymore, and those fans are not enough to keep a console afloat. 

How did the 3DS sell? How is it selling compared to the DS and more importantly, how are there them stocks lookin' for Ninty?

Not necessarily as the 360 does very well in the UK but not so well across Europe suggesting that the rest of Europe is influenced differently (possibly brand loyalty, pricing, marketing penetration, etc).  While I think the figures are likely to be similar it may be dangerous drawing the conclusion at the moment. 

Obviously, it's specific to the Wii U. Which means the question is, what is it about the Wii U that is weakening sales in the UK, assuming that the claim made in the article about availability is accurate?

My guess is price. The Wii U premium pack costs £299, which is the equivalent of US$480. For comparison, the 12GB PS3 costs £150, the 250GB 360 costs £170, and you can get a new Wii with Mario & Sonic at the London Olympics for £90 on Amazon UK. Some of the price increase can be blamed on various taxes (UK VAT is 20%, included in price, so pre-tax, Wii U premium price is equivalent to US$400), but it's still getting the Video Game tax that applies in Britain (and Europe, and Australia and New Zealand, and most of South and Central America, etc).

Of course, it's also wrong to assume that it's selling poorly in spite of high stock - that is, that it really was in plentiful supply, as the article claims. We have no idea what their basis for making that claim is - it could easily, for instance, have been based on walking into one store, seeing five Wii U boxes (no confirmation that there were Wii Us in them), and concluding that there must be a massive oversupply throughout the UK. For that matter, it's possible that they asked multiple retailers whether they had Wii Us in stock, but never asked how many of them were preorders that hadn't yet been claimed. We also don't know when in the week they were asking. Without a more solid basis, we must look at the attitude of the article... which seemed happy to emphasise Wii U performance, but ignores the fourth-best-selling game on the chart entirely. So I take that part with a grain of salt, for the time being.

Here's a bit of fun. This is a site that appears to check availability of stock of various things online (including online recording of in-store availability) in the UK. http://www.stockinformer.co.uk/checker-nintendo-wii-u

Many stores do have Wii U in stock, in both basic and premium... but there's something interesting. The Premium version bundled with ZombiU (which seems to be a very popular game in the UK, having an attach rate of over 38% in the first week) is sold out everywhere except ebay.

A really nice feature of the site is that it also tracks availability over time. So I checked the regular Premium Pack stock at GAME according to it... and it repeatedly goes in and out of stock, suggesting that there are limits to availability, there. Same is true of Zavvi. Another look at GAME more directly shows that their NSMB U bundles (Basic and Premium), their Skylanders bundles (B&P), and their ZombiU Premium bundle with Pro controller are out of stock.

I don't know what's going on with it all, but I tend not to just accept the words of gaming journalists at face value, nowadays. The most likely scenario, though, in my opinion, is that, without the massive rush to buy Wii U units as soon as they're available, people are more relaxed about being able to buy one when they're ready, and so sales are likely to be delayed to closer to Christmas, when people are doing christmas shopping, etc.

You are horribly mistaken. There are not 25m+ Nintendo fans out there, and yes many in the last 5 years bought NSMB Wii and Mario Kart Wii, so you might be eating crow after the U gets some time to build momentum and offer a better price.

As for 3DS, take a look at the charts, it's doing ok. As for the UK specifically, you'd have to go over the weeklies. I don't have the patience to do that, but, to give you an idea, here are the first few weeklies that isolate UK:

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/40783/UK/

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/40790/UK/

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/40797/UK/

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/40804/UK/

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/40811/UK/

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/40818/UK/

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/40825/UK/

There are more but I'm not going over all of them to prove what we already know, that the 3DS is doing ok in Europe.

But let's compare the stock scenario to that of the Nexus 4. The Wii U is reguarly in stock. The Nexus 4 sells out within minutes. It's obvious that joe-average isn't bothered about the Wii U and that your average gamer has either a 360 or PS3 to play on. Considering the Wii U isn't offering many exclusives that appeal to core gamers, well, why would they buy the Wii U?

meh it would be too much work to try to get "exact" data since we're getting them from ioi soon anyway.
WiiU is likely down around 50% in UK so just expect it to be down 50% in Europe to around 90k and if does better be happy and if it does worse be afraid, be very afraid :P

Are sales of the other current consoles reaching anywhere near the levels the PS2/DS/Wii reached when they were selling like crazy? If not, then why single the Wii U out.

The economic situation here in the UK is still pretty dire and hasn't improved much since 2008, unlike the US and other countries which are slowly gaining some traction. £300 ($485) for a console with no absolute must-have games yet is not going to come blasting out of the gate with spectacular numbers. Also hampering sales this year, GAME, the major video game retailer here comparable to Gamestop, has declared bankruptcy and had to close down hundreds of stores earlier this year.

So yeah, maybe the Wii U just hasn't caught on like the Wii did. Hopefully with a few good games it will improve in 2013.

Wow. We need to talk about this.

You're comparing a gaming system with smartphone. They are not comparable in this manner. And again, as I said, oftentimes the image of being hard to get drives immediate demand up, as people try harder to get them earlier due to the fear that they won't be able to get one until much later than they intended. This is why the Wii sold so well early on - the self-reinforcing demand cycle. Comparing Wii with Wii U in this way is unreasonable.

Meanwhile, I think you confuse core gamers with so-called hardcore gamers. Core gamers look at NSMB U, ZombiU, Black Ops 2, Scribblenauts, Assassin's Creed 3, Epic Mickey 2, Rabbids Land, and NintendoLand, and consider that to be quite a reasonable lineup for a launch, most likely with at least one of those games appealing to them. The self-professed "hardcore", on the other hand, will list off games not available for the system and go "that's why it has no games", rather than looking at what it actually has. And many will refuse to consider NSMB U, NintendoLand, or Scribblenauts to be appealing games because they aren't "teh maturez".

In the longer term, there's plenty of exclusives and semi-exclusives that appeal to core gamers, including Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, Dragon Quest X, Lego City Undercover, Pikmin 3, The Wonderful 101, Rayman Legends, and Bayonetta 2, to name the biggest confirmed ones. Again, most of these are titles that the so-called "hardcore" will refuse to pay attention to for one reason or another (MH3 and Bayonetta 2, probably because of the "traitor" element as they see it). The "hardcore" won't buy a Wii U unless given very strong reason to. Fortunately, the "hardcore" number in the hundreds of thousands at best, not in the millions.