You know what's interesting about that list in the original post? There are four consoles from the sixth generation on it, while there are only one or two consoles from the other generations. This previous generation was really special; not only that all the consoles were a success somehow (well probably the Dreamcast can't be titled a success, but the mistakes were done earlier at Sega, it's not the Dreamcast's fault that they are not producing hardware anymore), they were all very close. None of them had something really different from the others, and there were probably the most multiplatform titles of all times in that generation. This couldn't go on like that, and that was what Nintendo understood. They knew that it's time to offer something new to customers.
Oh, and @topic, I totally agree that it's not the case that only the console with the best sales rates is a good console, but the gaming library gets far bigger when the console sells the most, that's the important point I think. N64 had some of the best games of all times, but it only had a few good ones per genre.
