I dunno, with the recent mass drop, it could end up as low as 96...

12 Million in 2011...?

Not gonna happen. Wii has the same hardware as GC (just "overclocked", you may say) so there's no point in removing GC compatibility, it won't reduce unit cost one bit. That's unlike the PS3's backward compatibility with PS2, which required additional hardware parts to work, and thus removed to reduce costs.

Maybe it was an overstatement of my part, but Wii is declining pretty rapidilly, so it is worrying.

I don't see many people rushing to buy a GC for Super Mario Sunshine. In the other hand, NSMB Wii and DKR were the reasons I bough the Wii, and I doubt I'm alone.

Oh I doubt you are, there are many dedicated Nintendo fans out there, about 22 million going by last gen.

NSMB didn't push hw last xmas past any normal boost. It got a price cut, that's what boosts a console, and NSMB was the IT game at the time, flooded with adverts everywhere, of course it was going to sell.  Funnily enough though those adverts were the worst to portray Wii and what it does best (motion) like the mario kart wii ads and wii fit ect.

"True Nintendo fans"(whatever that means) already have bough the Wii. You simply decidd to ignore that what pushed me to buy my Wii wsn't the motiom controll gimick. And what makes you think that the best thing the  Wii has to offer is a gimick like motiom controls? The year's before ads showed people playing togheter is what the "We" is about, it never was the motiom control gimick.

DO you even know what sold the nes aka the 2nd highest selling nintendo system the system that built nintendo?
The gamecube of course had quality games but it didn't have games gor the masses
Sunshine was a poor man's Mario 64(which is also a poor man's version on 2-d mario)
wind waker was far away from what zelda OOT was.
Metroid wasn't big
The reason why nintendo kept gong down was because they kept being less "nintendo"
The nes and wii had the same goal, Expand gaming, I'm not going to get into details(because its getting long)
But wii=nes remake That is all

where was NSMB on the GCN?

LOL deary me.

What arnt you getting, I know in an ideal world a large percentage of its userbase is people that have bought the Wii for its Mario core titles ect and not for motion, but you're wrong, at this point it's likely less than gamecube. Wii HAS sold on its motion, if it were a normal console and those ads aired do you think it would have got anywhere? pfft. No.

You can design Wii anyway you like, the only way it was going to take off like it has was having motion controls with it. Stop pretending the world has embraced Nintendo again because of NSMB and ads showing "togetherness"

It was that advert of someone mimicing a bowling ball that got people interested and got people buying.

It seems to me a few Nintendo fans like to stick their head in the sand, completely forget about gamecube and pretend Nintendo made a comeback on the basis of  adverts of "togetherness" LOL if only it were that easy to get a 100 million userbase!!!