I really don't think there's much chance that the Wii U will "fail" as a venture. It's almost certainly going to make money for Nintendo. If by fail you mean sell poorly compared to next-gen competition/previous Nintendo consoles, it would be hard to sell only GameCube-level numbers since Nintendo isn't nearly as isolated to North America as it was in those days, as Soundwave said. So that's an almost guaranteed minimum of success. I also don't think the Wii U will miss out on many third-party games. If the next-gen game engines are as scalable as some of the developers have claimed, they shouldn't have much trouble making Wii U versions, even if they are lazy ports. The devs aren't going to turn down easy money.
However, let's say the worst happens: the Wii U sells substantially less than the Sony and Microsoft boxes and it's technologically inferior enough to miss out on the high-profile games. Nintendo has the cash reserves to survive the entire gen, so they definitely don't go out of business over one product's poor performance, and they probably still make most of the games that they were planning on making if the Wii U was a roaring success. As for the gamers, we fare no worse than during the Wii's lifetime, missing out on mainstream releases but enjoying a bunch of Nintendo titles.
When the Wii U was unveiled, I hoped that this could be the generation that brings back the NES/SNES days of the Nintendo console getting both the biggest third-party games and Nintendo's classics (and that's still a possibility at this point). If it doesn't work out that way, then it's nothing that Nintendo fans haven't been used to for 15 years.
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