I'll join the chorus saying that it's nonsensical to combine their sales. The mini consoles are standalone products in a completely different market environment, and no one so far has seriously considered adding the sales of remakes to that of their original releases.

I'd rather advocate for a whole different category for plug-an-play consoles. The PS Classic competed with the Mini SNES for sure, independently from their original generations. Again, market environment. Also, if Sega had released their Genesis mini earlier it would definitely be considered to be competing with those two.

Otherwise I wouldn't even mind the sales of these products. I'm a sheep who enjoys the SNES mini but I definitely don't see it as anything more than a cash grab playing on nostalgia (I ironically wasn't even around the SNES days, so I was definitely infected with some dumb cultural nostalgia crap. I've never bought a plug-and-play machine before). I wouldn't considered it a full-fledged gaming console, which OP would be implying if the sales were combined.

I see them as separate platforms. While the plug n play is based on an earlier platform, an NES classic mini is not the same thing as an NES. If this were the case, than iQue things sold in second world countries should count as N64s as well, but they don’t.

Option 3 is the clear, obvious, correct way to count them.