Cause Nintendo is stubborn. The Splatoon+Smash being $249 means that ALL the current bundles could be and should be $249 at least. If they were smart, with Black Friday having gone fairly well, I would do the price cut at the start of December, all bundles $250 max price. And make that the flat MSRP so that retailers can't screw them over by pricing higher.

they should ditch the gamepad and include a regular controller. Its a gimmick like the Kinect camera.

The last thing they need is to make losses again. The Wii U has done done it's best, but at this point lowering the price will not benefit them profit wise.

Gamepad costs them at least 50$ to produce (probably more)

PS4 controller and Xbox One controller probably cost 10$ to produce

Gamepad and Nintendo doesn't want to lose money on Wii U.

I have two possible explanations:

1) The Wii U costs more to develop. You've got a far more advanced controller in the gamepad compared to the xbox and playstation controllers.

2) Nintendo knows they have lost this generation, so at this point it is about having as much profit as possible. What's the point of taking losses on a device to push out systems this late into it's life cycle with this much failure so far? Sony and Microsoft are trying to push systems, so they are either taking losses or taking less profit than they could on their devices to increase market share. I don't Nintendo cares about market share with the Wii U, but rather is focused on the NX getting good market share, so they want to waste as little money as possible on the Wii U going forward.

Obviously, the gamepad is a factor. Sony and Microsoft are also willing to take losses on consoles to grow their install base. Nintendo doesn't do that. Also a factor is the strength of the yen. Nintendo has said several times that they wish to drop the price of the Wii U , but haven't been able to because of the exchange rate.

At this point, it wouldn't make sense for Nintendo to take a loss on the system at all. The Wii U is not a long term proposition anymore. Truthfully, though, they really need to keep the price at $250 going forward, and any cut from there would be beneficial (provided that Nintendo still made a marginal profit on it going forward).

Keep in mind people: the word floating the web is that Nintendo stopped making chips for the Wii U at 20M mark, towards the end of last year. If there is any truth in that, then they really aren't looking to rush their remaining stock out the window at no profit. If they can continue steady sales until the launch of the NX, they will remain profitable and maybe even sell out the whole production run.

In that scenario: they're playing a balancing act. Increase sales incrementally, but don't deplete their stock at any lower profit than is necessary to sell out on schedule.

Max profit over a fixed timetable.

I have bought four Wii U:s (for friends and family) allways under $200 in Q2.

Damn Nintendo should hire you for their marketing team.

I've never understood Nintendo's fixation on using the least amount of power as possible. I suppose it's a good thing environmentally, but when they're trying to sell systems, I've never known anyone that said, I'm getting the nintendo system, it uses the least amount of power. 

 And of course, the controller. The main reason the wiiu costs so damn much. So many bad choices with the wiiu, it's insane.