What people dislike about Wii U hardware?

[JRPGfan]

Gamepad alone probably doubled the price of the thing.
If it had launched with a normal controller, they could have halved the price of the unit.
Resulting in much more sales overall (imo).

The gamepad was bulky, heavy, and not optimal to use (most people resorting to buying a pro controller for it, to game with).
And in the games were they really tried to take advantage of the gamepad, the games suffered for it.
(starfox comes to mind)

Anyways, bad sales caused Nintendo to pull developement early on, so there was game droughts, that just made the issue worse.
So it wasnt all just hardware's fault. It was a spiral of alot of things going wrong.

People that say it was just "marketing" are wrong however.
Nintendo brand is so big (so many loyal fans), that even with horrible marketing, if they put out a good device it will sell reguardless.
For people to not buy the Wii U, it was apparent that it wasnt a great product.

It came out, near the end of the gen, and was basically just upto par with the others on the market (that had been out for along time, and was soon moveing on). Soon PS4/XB1 launched, and that took alot of the hype away. At that point it was clear, the Wii U was old gen tech.

Hence another reason I think Nintendo purposefully launches their consoles, mid-gen, away from its competitors.
And why it changed its hardware to be differnt, so it would avoid direct compairsions.