Did Nintendo screw us?

[Final-Fan]

I'm both sick and at work (I'd be home but my other 2 coworkers are sicker and already home), so I'll just give this a short response:

1. Are you conceding that the "weakest points" people have picked apart were in fact wrong, and you now want to concentrate on what you still think you got right?

2. As for the lineup:  Nice. I think that the Wii's is not as far behind it as you think, even with your silly "third party" requirement.  More importantly, though, you ignore the point many have made, most recently RolStoppable:  If 3rd parties would have believed in the Wii, we would have already seen several big budget 3rd party games released by now.  The 3rd party games so far have had either a small or a medium budget with the exception of Red Steel (although lack of development time meant that the money was wasted).  Given that the Wii success only became apparent to 3rd parties several months after launch and that quality games usually take 18-24 months of development time, we can expect to see the first bunch of bigger efforts of 3rd parties in fall 2008.

The PS2 was widely expected to take the console generation by storm, and it DID.  This incentive to developers was exaggerated by the fact that at the time, aside from the Dreamcast which was largely ignored, the PS2 was the only "next gen" system in town, the other two following a year later.  The Wii was exactly the opposite:  launching a year after the frontrunner and with analysts predicting it to be in third place just like the Gamecube, if not worse because of Microsoft's growing lead and experience.  (Note:  we knew that analysts are stupid and wrong, but they all have jobs so obviously companies listen to them.) 

3. Developers are not feeling the incentive to pull together huge teams to make Wii games. They see that they need them to be successful on 360 and PS3.  They don't have endless amounts of spare cash and manpower.
Your argument works against you.  If developers have only limited resources to spend on game development, why on earth wouldn't they want to spend it making games on a system that's much easier and cheaper to develop for, AND has much less competition by your own statement, AND is going to have an audience at least as large as the other two systems combined without the extra expense of making a port? 

In fact, counterpoint 3 was a last-minute addition to this response, and it grew into what I consider the strongest counterargument of all.  Hmm, that sounds familiar somehow...