What Nintendo should have done, is try to genuinely (not half ass) recapture the core market, by offering a true next system in terms of power. Nintendo at the time thought "we have the casuals on lock" so they should have emulated what MS did in stealing the PS fanbase, by taking advantage of a 1 yr head start. This would have shown devs and the gaming community "ok, Nintendo is serious again!".
But by making the faux tablet MANDATORY, it added unnecessary cost to the system. The faux tab - pro controller cost differential should have been added to the budget toward getting the best gpu/cpu and ram possible. It is more than evident now, that Nintendo never had any real breakthrough ideas/innovation in game play when it comes to the Faux tab. But when Nintendo was in meetings coming up with ideas for their system after Wii, they likely said "oh people mainly use wifi for their tablets, which means mostly home use" so they included this gimmicky Faux tablet with terrible signal power, to entice the casual Wii market. Nintendo wrongfully assumed parents/kids would prefer a Wii U (gamepad) over actual ipad/android tablets.
I personally like the gamepad for its off tv play, but the thing should have been optional and not sacrificed HW power for it.
