the gamepad is better than slightly more powerfull hardware

As long as FPSs still support the Wiimote on Wii U, then it's Wii U.

People used to say that Nintendo would release a new console 2 or 3 years after the Wii because it was so underpowered and defenseless against mighty PS360 :)

Well, Dolphin is an excellent example of what community can do in making superb emulator - I have no doubt that Nintendo can make 100% accurate Wii emulator if they want.

As for Gamepad - I agree, I think Wiimote has vastly more mass appeal than Gamepad....that's why I think they should've opted to pursue Wii route, and make Gamepad (or more presicely, version of it) just a convenience option, a Pro contoller with screen if you wish, without being main feature or requiring extra devs focus - it would still be differentiating feature, but not focus.

I believe that your approach for backward compatibility is not feasible if you want BC to have 90% of the games working with no major bugs at launch.

Let’s assume that Nintendo wanted to develop an emulator that does basically the same things that vWii does on the Wii U and ignore extra features like gamepad support and native upscaling since them would require a lot extra of coding and testing.

Low level emulation requires a lot of CPU/GPU power (a low level SNES emulator requires a Core 2 Duo CPU) so in theory it is impossible to implement it on the setup you suggested.

So Nintendo would have to develop a high level emulator. However it would require extensive testing and custom RAM patches for basically every single relevant Wii title released since it is not as reliable as low level emulation. Nintendo would probably have to release an emulator compatible with a few key titles at launch and then improve it in the flowing years which would make the project way too expensive and consume resources that could be allocated in the development of original Wii U titles.

Finally, while Dolphin is amazing and I have a lot respect to its developers, it has a lot of problems. It cannot proper use modern multi thread processors and it barely uses the GPU while sending intensive chunks of code for the CPU, it also has many of bugs and randomly crashes. All those things make it nowhere near to a commercial product and we have to remember that Nintendo products are usually more polished than ordinary commercial products.

Perhaps a better solution would be two SKU's, one with the Wii hardware inside and another without it. It would allow the backward compatible version of the console to run almost 100% of the Wii games. But it would be just like it is on the Wii U now so Nintendo would need to abdicate not trivial enhancements (like native upscaling) that could lead to unexpected behavior and consequently drain more resources to develop/test.

Wii HD just sounds like a wii but in HD

http://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Wii

Well, considering how many titles have perfect or playable rating on Dolphin (5 or 4 stars), my impression is that on suggested hardware, which is so much above Wii's, Nintendo would not have any problems making really perfect emulation if they wanted to. As for upscaling....I'm pretty sure that's all that WiiU is doing there - upscales, just like PS360 or any modern DVD player upscales to 1080p - it does not upres, like Dolphin is doing, and upscaling is not really dependant on CPU/GPU combo...

WiiU, it's an excellent system and the Gamepad is great. WiiHD may have been a better name for it, however...

From the looks of sales, WiiHD would have been a better option.

Would've confused too many people, "WiiHD" sounds like it could just be literally a Wii with souped up graphics. And not a new console.