Even if Nintendo has some new controller gimmick that takes off, it will be copied very quickly this time around. EVERY big tech company is looking for next big thing, look at how many "me toos" are doing VR, the moment anything new has even the slightest hint of doing well, several companies, Sony and Microsoft included will copy it.
It won't be much different from the N64 having its analog stick and rumble pak copied within about a year. I mean shit, Sega even copied the analog stick idea before Nintendo could even release Mario 64.
That said I don't even think they have something like that and they know it. They wouldn't have made this choice to support mobile if they were sitting on some miracle idea that could change the company's fortunes. No doubt before going ahead with the DeNA deal they did an internal audit of their R&D ideas for the future and gauged the viability of such ideas being able to carry the company going forward. They wouldn't have a company altering decision like that if they felt like their traditional hardware concepts for the future were good enough to lead the company to success.
More likely what I suspect NX will actually be is Miyamoto's swan song and him getting license to make a console that's quirky/different for its own sake with the fusion concept also thrown in there, rather than being some Wii-like phenmonenon. There is no market audience that's underserved for gaming today as there was in 2003/04, we know where all the casuals are, they play on phones, Nintendo conceeded as much by bending over to the iOS/Android market.
Gunpei Yokoi's "withered technology" philosophy was mainly supposed to be intended for handhelds, he didn't have much to do with Nintendo's console development and his last hardware concept (Virtual Boy) was a full-on bomb. The NES even was seen as a monstrous upgrade to what most people at that time looked at "standard console gaming", before the NES came, this was what most people though home console games looked/played like:

And that's a high end game, lol. The NES with multi-scrolling levels for virtually every game and far better visuals totally changed how people perceived home console games. For the average consumer in the 80s, the NES was very much as large of a technical leap forward as the PS2 to PS3 or whatever.
-2.jpg)







