It's also ironically made it the hardest to mod/hack/pirate.

Did the author see the Xbox One catastrophe?

Nintendo actually looks to be in a pretty good position... if they choose to act correctly.

Nintendo seems to have taken the approach they take with their portable machines with incremental improvements to their home console hardware rather then trying to match or overtake their competitors with the Wii and Wii U.

Ultimately, they might be able to pull this off, particularly in Japan where most developers are preferring developing for portables and PC due to the high cost of putting out AAA games on consoles, but they really need to move quickly and decisively with the software they chose to promote the system. Mario can carry the system to a degree but both the Japanese market and the Western markets of Europe and NA are going to need more.

I actually see Nintendo in the best position. Most game players that are targeted by ps4 and xbox one are the same ones that are realizing that power comes from PC, not game consoles. So many of them will just buy a more powerful computer for the multi-plats and a Wii-U for the exclusives. The other systems just don't have the vast amount of exclusives to justify the purchase.

I think Nintendo looks good for what you're are looking for from a console but overall, I would not wager a dime on Nintendo this gen.

They will not grow their Wii aquired userbase one bit this gen but will actually lose a major portion of the casuals since everyone is doing the casual thing. 

Microsoft at least pushed Nintendo to 2nd place or possibly 1st this gen

Sony doesn't seem to be doing it, but they might.

I don't think Microsoft is going to suceed with the causals. The Xbox One is too bloated. But I have to know more about what games Nintendo are going to make before I caould confidently bet on them. If, however they'll reveal a Wii Sports sucessor, I'd bet on them winning next gen.

I guess we will see if it happens, but I'm thinking that the Wii Sports ship has sailed along with the Guitar Hero/Rockband ship as well as Dance Central boat...

If this is an issue, it will take at least a couple years to materialize. Development costs are too high for publishers to throw away the PS360 userbase for a while yet, so they're going to keep developing games to run on Power-based systems. Since pretty much every game development framework in use today is designed to straddle the Power/x86 divide (and don't forget Power-derived ARM), I'm not sure this will actually ever be a problem.

Different architectures between consoles never stopped devs from porting games.
Wii U is an easy system to develop for and given that many games will still be coming to PS3 and Xbox 360, no reason to not do a port on Wii U.