Having a monitor only one to two feet away is just nice in general. Its why browsing on the internet with a computer and smartphone screen is much better than on our TV several feet away. The only benefit of a TV is its huge size and letting many people in a living room view it. A monitor on your desk doesn't need to be big though if you 1-2 feet away from it. You'll probably see better details sitting closer to the action anyway.

And you can always use that monitor as your new PC one or a second extended screen for your laptop. You can also use it for other consoles too! However, for all consoles, you'll have to buy a cable that is HDMI in one end and a VGA/DVI at the other if the monitor lacks a hdmi port.

If the monitor you buy lacks speakers, and you don't want to use the headphone jack on the GamePad, you will need an audio receiver /sound system and speakers that can connect to the Wii U. If you have the old Wii AV cable, you can use that to connect to the sound system. I have an sound system from the 90s that worked perfectly with the Wii's audio AV wires, so finding those shouldn't be hard.

Yup I'm using the wii mote and nunchuck. The trick is to put the sensor bar on top of the screen and scoot your chair a little back. There were some problems registering the pointer after putting them down, but it took only a few seconds to get working again.

yes i do though my monitor is a TV that i mainly just use as a monitor since i don't watch a lot of TV anymore. also before the patch in August that added a mini map in game to Mario Kart i in fact did have my gamepad set up that way