^^
Asking users is obviously oversimplifying a wider process of studying existent and potential market, nevertheless it must be done too, as it often helps clearing some issues (*).
And about SW houses, I wrote about asking the most dynamic and open to innovation ones, although reassuring the most conservative they'll have adequate dev tools to make good use of new features and that nobody wants to disrupt them, but opening them new unexploited markets and making them disruptive, not disrupted, could help a lot, marketing must not always mean swindling people, if there are concrete ideas behind it can be actually informative and constructive.
Nintendo, having a so strong SW division, is in a different position from its HW competitors, it owns dynamic developers to ask, but Sony and MS would better ask also selected 3rd parties, because not having in house the same instruments as Nintendo, they must complete them.
Finally, Nintendo hasn't to change its plans, at most fine tune some particulars, but simply avoid lowering its guard or resting on its laurels.
(*)Edit: Although you are right about the risk of being misleading, for a simple reason: as most hardcore gamers, with tastes often quite different from the masses, are more likely to exhaustively answer polls, the sample will be quite biased and answers will need to be adequately weighted and filtered. Not doing it the result will likely be similar to letting an engineer write an instruction manual aimed to housewives (and so making them desperate ones 
).
