I think people are not looking at the quote in proper context either, he's not saying they were banking on the instant boot feature to sell systems, but as a WHOLE feature set, they were betting on the "tablet" concept being a hit (one of the appeals of the tablet is that it doesn't have to boot up like a laptop or PC, you can use it instantly in the living room or anywhere else).
And Nintendo was actually right about that.
The tablet was a big, big hit. Bigger than the Wii actually.
Unfortunately for them, it was Apple's big hit, not theirs.
Read again:
And we thought that with a tablet-type functionality connected to the system, you could have the rapid boot-up of tablet-type functionality, you could have the convenience of having that touch control with you there on the couch while you’re playing on a device that’s connected to the TV, and it would be a very unique system that could introduce some unique styles of play.
I think unfortunately what ended up happening was that tablets themselves appeared in the marketplace and evolved very, very rapidly, and unfortunately the Wii U system launched at a time where the uniqueness of those features were perhaps not as strong as they were when we had first begun developing them.
They had the tablet idea in development before the iPad released but took so long to bring it out that the iPad already had come out and so the Wii U tablet looked like a second rate (well) toy by comparison.
But fundamentally Nintendo's read that the tablet was going to be a revolution in household entertainment/computing wasn't actually off the mark. They were just in way over their head. We see it every day too ... people watching TV in their living room with their tablet in their lap.
