I would declare it a disaster if Nintendo go for external hard drives instead of having every console having at least 80GB built in by now. Your online market simply won't be anywhere near as strong if it requires people to buy a hard drive on their own - you simply won't have as many people on board if it requires them to buy this stuff on their own.

 WiiWare has a lot of problem and has quickly become an unviable service for online games. Nintendo dipped their toes into the online thing but they're so far behind Microsoft and Sony it's hard to see them catching up. I just don't think they're a company who could ever wrap their head round this stuff - theres some stuff they absoulely nail but I think they'll always be behind online. Mind you, Microsoft and to a lesser extent, Sony, still have a lot to learn.

While you do have a point, I really don't consider the bolded a problem as lots of people even bought new consoles once their old hard drives ran out of memory (they also did it for the re-shapes, but still). I really don't see the problem. People who don't need or want expensive hard drives would save a lot of money from this.

As for WiiWare, yeah, it's a fucking disaster.

 The reality is though, if your external hard drive is entirely optional, you split the userbase. Wii Fit was a mad mad successul, but it still only got adopted by what? 25% of the WIi userbase max. Same with Wii Motion+. Smaller numbers for Kinect and Move.

 For me the reality is if you don't launch with a hard drive, you're instantly making a large % of your userbase never buy online games and quickly killing your online store. You could get away with that in 2006 but not 2012...

I guess there's just a split opinion then, as I believe that the higher price will make them lose more money when some casuals don't buy the system than the money they'd gain from the "hardcore" gamers who download digital copis of games that takes several gig's to store. After all, most games bought online on Nintendo consoles are probably going to be the one's that doesn't take that much memory.

This all depends on how many non-casuals that actually ends up buying the system, which I believe will be very few. At least during the first years when the price already is higher than it ever will be.

For the record, Nintendo is supposed to be limiting the thing to 8 Gigs of internal memory, though that was as of E3, and could have changed vastly by now. However, if the Wii U size has not changed, i don't see how they could be running a real HDD in there...