Its all good!!! I wanted (and predicted) 2.75mil, Oh wellll!

I think a lot of people think is not doing great because it hasn't been the madness the Wii was back in 2006, which in all honesty nobody was expecting really.

The launch has been like I expected, not as great as the Wii but better than the PS360 which is fine imo. Nintendo have to do something about Europe though, those numbers are starting to get kinda worrisome, but thankfully N.A and Japan are doing fine.

It's worrying, because the industry has worked against Nintendo since the N64. Nintendo has to have spectacular sales, or the rest of the industry can just freeze their console out.

Since the Wii U does not have spectacular sales, it makes me worry that the industry will freeze it out like the Gamecube, and if that happens, the HD sucessors have to do really bad to even make good Wii U support possible.

Nintendo is only shipping 5.5. million units by the end of March. How was 5 million by the end of December even possible?

other than there were at least a few that expected wiiU to be a big hit like the wii ...  that is pretty much what i think too.

Yes the plan is to ship 5.5 million by the end of the fiscal year, that means by the end of march 2013, also it is number of units shipped not sold to consumer, it seems they will be a little short but not by much.

Its doing okay, nothing more and nothing less. Its performing more or less exactly like I thought it would.
The 5.5 million shipped by the fiscal year will be a toughie though, stuffing the channels with 3 million consoles during the january/february/march plummet will be terribly difficult. One also has to consider excess stock from the holidays, shipments are often very small in january even if the sales can be decent or even very good.
4.5 million shipped and 4 million sold to end user by the fiscal year, is my prediction right now. We could easily see sub-100k numbers for several weeks until then and we know that 70% of hardware sales happen in Q4.
Overall, it should manage to sell about 10-11 million units this calendar year, bar a price cut in the fall/winter (which is highly unlikely). It won't break any records but, honestly, from what I can tell by the mood and sentiments in here in the past months, no one expected it to either.

While I agree that the Wii was a sales phenomenon, how is it unfair to compare the two (the Wii U, that is)? Was it also unfair to compare the PS2 to the PS1 (or vice versa) and is it unfair to compare the PS3 and PS2 as well? DS and 3DS? I don't get it.

Much better than the PS3 and 360 in the same launch period and very close to the Wii. Very very good results! The numbers never lie.

Not too bad. 3DS started off too slow for some people, and it is selling hot right now.

did great due to larger competition.