accounting for a missing 400k is easy. The Wiis you see in shops weren't built the day before. A Wii that you see in a shop on your average October Sunday morning at 7 am was probably built in September or even August in China, then put on a ship and sailed to America. As well as this, there's time that the Wiis have to stay in place, get sent around in trucks, etc. There's generally a slow paced march from China to America which we'll say for the sake of argument (and easy maths) takes one month. That means Nintendo's entire October shipment (minus stockpiles) was actually built in September. And the December shipment was actually built in November.
Now it comes to Christmas and Nintendo needs to ship as many bloody Wiis to America as possible to give little Timmy a Christmas present. They triple their distribution workforce, and perhaps start sending them in via plane rather than boat. Let's say they cut their distribution time down to a single week. This means in December, not only do they get their usual 1.8 million per month from November production, but they also get 3/4 of Decembers production (1.35 million) on top of that. On top of whatever they have stockpiled, which I imagine they would keep in China, and then ship in November.
But these numbers have to come from somewhere. For the entire of December Nintendo has an incredibly fast (and more expensive) shipping procedure. This means that Decembers production gets sold 3/4 in January and 1/4 in February. Meanwhile, January's production is sold in February, as Nintendo returns to normal shipping. Poor lonely January only has 450k Wiis to sell worldwide, no wonder Nintendo didn't make too many of those rainchecks!
Note that this is what happened to the DS last Christmas, remember how DS sales were so low in January 07? That's because they sold them in December.
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