It's hard to imagine Nintendo are making a loss on such a low cost console. It's likely to cost less to make than a hard drive equipped ps3 or 360. It's the absolute minimum in hardware and licensing.
The gamecube was a state of the art console for its time. Yes it didn't have the brute force of the original xbox but it was still impressive. The wii u lags behind 360 and PS3 in overall performance due to weak cpu performance. The wii u can definitely go a lot cheaper and Nintendo can bundle more software.
It's difficult to predict what Nintendo will do though. Their decisions recently have been a disaster and its quite possible we will have more of the same going forward.
Nintendo have he potential to have a fantastic Christmas 2014 with a very competitively priced wii u with mario kart and perhaps another game. Nintendo need to realise they are in a corner and they need to create a must have package that will appeal to a huge audience.
Ultimately if Nintendo fail it would seem that perhaps they will be a handheld console only manufacturer and this may be the beginning of the end for Nintendo. I personally think its powerful dedicated gaming hardware that will survive long term and its the casual market that will be saturated by phones, tablets and other low cost hardware. Nintendo will struggle to find margins in such an arena.
