I think in all seriousness their big take away from this gen will be that the console business is too damn hard, and by making their handheld (basically) their home console too, they solve a lot of their headaches.
Because right now when a console doesn't do well it presents a host of problems for Nintendo -- games that you've invested huge amounts of money and resources into like Smash U or Mario Kart 8 or even things like Bayonetta 2 don't sell what you would hope because you don't have a userbase to sell them to. You have to juggle between supporting the console and the portable and sales of both suffer as a result of wishy washy support for both.
You have to market for both seperately. If you have a bad selling console it can also cause manfacuturing/financial losses which is a headache you don't need when you already are trying to squeeze fleeting profit from the portable as is.
Unified platform is the solution, but really what that actually will mean is really Nintendo will make a portable platform. The "home" version will just be the handheld souped up to run games at a higher resolution. But it will be the same games.
So Wii U in a lot of ways will be IMO the last traditional Nintendo home console, as in one that was completely discreet and separate from the handheld line.
I think for Nintendo they will "liberated" by this, selling consoles has caused Nintendo so much strife and headache really from the NES days onwards, and Nintendo doesn't like that. Now if the home version sells good, great, if it doesn't, well not a huge deal, Mario Kart 9 will still have plenty of users to sell to on the handheld side. If the home console doesn't sell well, they're not stuck with a ton of unsold inventory they have to take a loss on, infact if the handheld and home version use the same chips, they could just repurpose the chips/RAM meant for the console version into their handhelds. Some fans may not like it, but I think for Nintendo it will be a big relief.
