they would now be doomed for real

I don't even think the SD/HD thing was a factor at all with the Wii. About 40-50 million people wanted to play Nintendo games on whatever system nintendo put out. About 60-50 million people wanted to play Wii Sports/Wii Fit games.

Mario sells to the normal Nintendo crowd. It does not sell to the huge number of brand new people who had never even bought a console before that bought the Wii.

I think its entirely possible a significant portion of the original Wii install base will never buy the Wii U (or the PS4/XBONE for that matter).

To people who care about multiplat or HD games, they never even considered Nintendo in the first place. Wii showed them Nintendo wasn't going to cater to them and despite Nintendo saying they were going to go after the core gamer, the Wii U shows yet again that NIntendo can't do what the PS4/XBONE crowd want.

To be honest how many "console generations" are even left?

By Playstation 5 I think you'll be getting to the point where relatively photorealistic graphics will be possible (at least to the extent that the general public cares about) that you're hitting the point of diminishing returns. Also likely is that the amount of publishers will be whittled down to maybe 5-6 big ones (like the Hollywood studios) because no one will be able to afford to make such high end games without a huge budget.

Beyond that I think what we consider high end chipsets now will become cheap commodities that can be cheaply integrated into cable boxes or the television itself, or into say a tablet or cell phone, which then can stream to a TV -- a lot of people simply won't need a giant brick under their TV to play games with relatively high levels of visual fidelity.

Not to mention I think streaming services like Sony's Gaikai will continue to improve and a "Netflix" equivalent to gaming is inevitable ... that'll be a situation where you really don't need a console at all, just a controller and a smart TV. 

After all the cash Nintendo burned in R&D on the 3DS and Wii U, they need to wait a few years and recoup that on software royalties before pushing out another system too soon.

There is no way that I would pay another 500 $ for new hardware if the Wii U would be replaced after 2 years on the market. Especially considering the fact that Nintendo (and third parties) failed to provide exclusive quality software for the first 7 months of 2013.

yes, home consoles are that expensive in my home country. And I really do love playing on my Wii U.

Doomed if they did that?

I doubt it, as they are doomed now. Why not take a shot to turn things around?

TBH I wont think you can make a console powerful enough that follows its current architecture. So they would need to drop backwards compatibility or have some other chips in the system to offer it. So would add more cost.

They will need to just ride out the wave atm as launching mid gen would be suicide.

Lol, you are right - that's 3 years! Way too soon anyway.

The PS 4 is 650 USD for reference, and the cheapest PS 3 model is 250 USD. Anyway it's pretty misleading cause wages are pretty high here in general. And I never thought the Wii U was bad value for money. The Wii U is now priced 400 USD.

"Total disaster" isn't far off from where Nintendo is now anyway, console wise anyway, lol. 

I don't think people want to pay $300 or more for what the WII U offers, not that Nintendo couldn't possibly make a console that actually justified and sold well at that price point. No one wants a Nintendo's take on marrying the 360 with the Wii in the year 2013 for $300 when they already have a PS3/360 and a Wii sitting at home. 

Nope, initially when I first heard reports of what Project: Cafe (Wii U) was, my thought was "if it's just a 360/PS3 level system, Nintendo could be in some trouble". Because that would put all the pressure on the controller to differniate the console, and as we've seen the tablet controller hasn't been able to sell the console, so Nintendo's basically stuck with an overpriced XBox 360, eight years after the 360 launched. 

As for casuals -- I stand by that thread. I'm glad they're gone. Enjoy Candy Crush on iPad for $1 and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. I'm going to have a nice laugh when the new Wii Sports/Fit do jack all for hardware sales just like Brain Training on the 3DS.