The WiiU always had a poor line up. It didn't help that Nintendo sacrificed it to make games for the Switch even delaying Zelda's release on it. It also did not have the benefit of being a handheld which guarantees 20M sold in Japan alone.

You do make a good point in terms of the Switch. It's not just it's excellent line of 1st year games that makes it appealing, but the hardware itself. That dual portability/TV play does certainly does make it a more enticing buy.

Look, I loved the WiiU.... but the first year lineup was totally abysmal compared to Switch

PS4 was also better buildt...... it was cheaper & more powerfull, and easier to develope for (no esram ect).

and nintendo are actually closer to PS4/xb1 in performance, than the Wii was to the PS3/Xb360.

Because how gimpy their hardware usuallly is/was, they managed to both improve relative performance (to competitor's) while going mobile.

They are actually getting some 3rd party multiplat ports this time around.

That's why I said two.

Probably not... Because the Wii U (as its name implies) was still targeting the Wii audience.  And Nintendo bungled the sequel to the two biggest Wii system sellers (Wii Sports Club/Wii Fit U).  And they really didn't have any good titles to make up for that for the Wii audience.  It may be the case that the Wii audience wouldn't have been interested either way, but Nintendo really didn't even make an effort to retain them.  

Considering that, I don't think Zelda alone would have salvaged things.  They didn't have enough other stuff to go along with it.  But, suppose Breath of the Wild, Splatoon, and Mario Maker were all first year titles.  In that case, the Wii U could have been a modest success. 

Well, almost any console lineup for the first year looks abysmal compared to the Switch tbh XD. But, yeah, the WiiU first year was abysmal. Probably the first time I didn't buy a Nintendo console at launch. I still loved my poor WiiU because I had the opportunity to play really good exclusives.

For the first year I was incredibly disapointed with the WiiU, in fact it wasn´t until Mario Kart 8  when I became really interested and bought it, fortunately I did not regret it, I really liked many exclusives there and I really think is a heavily underrated console, but Switch is showing serious potential to become the best Nintendo console ever, is just in another level.

Exactly, I actually bought the WiiU just when MK8 released (and I got a sweet, sweet price of 180€ bundled ). And I don't regret it. But Switch, yeah, is on another level. If they keep this insane level, we might be talking about the best Nintendo console ever. Which automatically makes it the best console ever for me XD.

Definitely, for me too. To surpass the level of Super Nintendo is gonna be very hard but at this rhythm I wouldn't be surprised.

You can sell anything if its marketed well. Sales never equals quality.
You can have the best product on the market that isn't marketed well and doesnt sell and you can have a bad product marketed very well and sells well.
Its the human logic. We go to what is presented best to us not what is better for us.

In some rare cases there can be both and the Switch is proof of that.