People did not care about the Wii remote any more that they care about the gamepad. The huge difference is, just like Jumpin already said, how it was used.

In retrospect it is obvious that Nintendo was going with the Wii U/Gamecube route. Even though you might expect Nintendo not going the uninteresting games route after they saw how uninteresting games killed Wii sales. Wii 2 was excactly what people was waiting for, that might even be the reason why Nintendo did not make Wii 2.

It was not the tablets people Nintendo was going after (not directly that is, as tablets share the core gamer values), but it was the industry's core audience Nintendo wanted. I can't remember what games Wii U was released with, but I'd recall they were mostly core games (like Nintendo land), with some cheaply and quickly churned out games like NSMBU. TThere's a big difference between publishing cheap shit and investing into something to make it better quality

No, that's not what it should have done. The point of the Wii remote is simplicity, and motion plus controls take away lots of the simplicity.

Instead of motion plus as a Wii peripheral, however, Nintendo should have released Wii U with the controller. It would've been a console with better controls and better graphics. This is in retrospect - when MP peripheral was released/announced, the competitors were expected to make a similar controller, so Nintendo made it to "get there first".

Wasn't the evolution of the DS. Assymetric gameplay was the intention and DS type games and back catalog was the fallback.

If asymetric gameplay was the gimmick then they not only were out of their mind, as that is not something anyone wanted, particularly on the online era, but they also failed miserably. NintendoLand was the only Nintendo game with asymetric gameplay.

I agree. Go and watch the Wii U reveal. It was all about assymetric gameplay. Total lost cause and not revolutionary in any way but i think they thought they could get some 3rd party support from the people who made DS games.

Nintendo should have just spat in their face like they did to Nintendo.

What Ninty said is a half truth (or a half lie, if you prefer    ) : The exact model of 3-axes gyro used in the WiiMote Plus wasn't available, but there were other models already available. About the gamepad, a less bulky controller with a smaller display could have been more appreciated, and it would surely have been a lot less expensive.

I don't agree about your first point: a Wiimote Plus can also be used as a plain Wiimote (and it actually was almost always, even when it could have been a nice plus to use the Plus, due to publishers preferring to cater for the whole user base), so you get both potential user bases, but the opposite isn't possible.
Anyhow, even not launching it with Wii U, I think that giving it with Wii U too would have been a good idea.

I personally thought it was a miserable pile of secrets.

Secrets?

besides swinging your arm to simulate a tennis racket or golf club, what actions did they make simple?

I agree to an extent, the wiimote should have worked like Wii motion + from day one. But it wasnt like Ninty themselves were even supporting Wiimote+. They had sports resort. I Wii Play sequel that no one really cared about and Zelda. If Ninty didnt care i didnt expect 3rd parties to care either.  A better controller still would not have helped the actual hardware as it was still woefully behind, so the system would have still missed a lot of games that core gamers would play (not that it really mattered i guess since if you were that type of gamer you had another system). But yeah i agree they def could have extended the life of it. Shortsighted is def something I would call the Wii