Couple problems with your defense of Pachter.

He's a market analyst and he should not take the 'core' gamer viewpoint but that of the entire market. The entire market overwhelmingly liked the Wii over the others, yet he and 3rd parties picked others solely due to power differences.

The others continue the status quo, Nintendo is the only one that tries to push the audience to new extremes. They try to take gaming past other forms of entertainment and largely succeeded with DS and Wii. The Gamepad is the continuation of that. It takes what is becoming the norm (i.e. slate tablet computing in mobile environments) and puts that in a purely entertainment fashion. It is a big deal and as long as marketed right, should be another boom and another pull for the mass market.

Pachter should be seeing that potential, yet like the Wii before it, he is only looking at it from a core gamer point of view and a irrational need for cutting edge power. Wii and DS should of already proved that this market, this gaming console industry does not need or really want that in a large mass market scenario. All it wants is fun and exciting entertainment. Wii brought that. DS brought that. Wii U has the potential to bring that.

Pachter is not a good analyst. He was wrong day 1 on Wii and DS. He was continuously wrong through Wii's lifetime. But its his push for cutting edge and the narrowmindedness of dev houses that felt they needed that in order to survive which ultimately caused many of them to go out of business as costs ran too high.

Games like COD sell better than BF3 even though BF3 has next-gen graphics, AI, environments, etc on high-end PCs. Games like NSBMWii in 480p sell ten times over nearly any HD game that cost ten times to create. Why? Because its more about the game and the experience than the pretty tech. Same reason Wii was the dominate seller and was sold out for its first two years even though it was by far the lowest powered home console this gen.

Patcher is wrong again. He is blatantly ignoring the mass market for the core... the 10-15% of potential customers. Wii U may or may not hit Wii levels of 20m+ a year in sales, but it will sale well. It will be well received. It will be higher than the average 10m/yr the PS360 did and higher than neXtBox/PS4 if they go the same route of just increasing the power of the console (and price, size, power usage, etc).

Oh just ignore them - that's what pachters does ;)

Unique experiences are what I love about my Wii.   I'm not convinced WiiU will be unique though.  With Vita, Smart glass and dual analog Android systems coming out, if WiiU proves sufficiently popular it's games could be (potentially) ported across all systems, even dual screen Android would be within the realm of possibility (iOS too), minus the Nintendo exclusives of course.   Plus we don't know what MS/Sony are doing yet.  Their next systems might be more novel than WiiU.

I'd love to be excited enough to get a WiiU myself but so far, nothing on it has inspired me.

1- not powerful enough to pull the core from their existing consoles
2- not novel enough to pull casuals from their ipads

1. was tried with the GC -> a rather big fail -> small profit and a big collapse in market size. 

2. was tried with the Wii -> a mixed bag -> great sales, but It proved to be too unique for most developers.

Both didn't work out great.  So, Nintendo is now trying 1.5 - a mixture of both. The fact that you can't pin the WiiU down on both points, might be its biggest strengh. Nintendo is clearly aiming for some middle ground here.