The transition from "SD to HD" has been worse than they thought, that's why they delayed some games.

to me, honestly WiiU is a WiiHD not a Next Gen console, its the most powerful current Gen that launched too late...

They made the right decision, the year head start on the other two consoles is worth its weight in gold with regards to third party support after the other two consoles are released.

The release of the delayed titles such as Lego City Undercover, Wii Fit, Pikmin 3, Wonderful 101 and Game & Wario on top of the releases of 3D Mario and Mario Kart 8 before Christmas should see consoles shifting. I'm personally expecting the installed userbase to be between 10 and 15m before the end of the calendar year, meaning that the Wii U should get ports of third party titles now that Nintendo have released a console with a standard rendering pipeline.

they should have released it a year earlier

wiiU has been out since november which is about 5 months now. to date nintendo has released 2 first/second party games. that, imo, is a bad strategy. momentum is dead and it will be costly to create it. nintendo has basically made it sony/ms's generation to lose at this point.

If anything, they should've released it in 2011 with a normal controller or Wiimote. I have a feeling that the specs were nailed down for quite some time but Nintendo decided to spend their R&D on the Gamepad.  And waiting for component prices to go down to make the system as cost effective as possible (being powerful enough to handle current gen games).

No.
Nintendo rushed the WiiU into the holiday season. They got a good deal on the holidays. However the post-launch was bad.
That's pretty much what happenend. Nothing terrible, nothing great either.

For the future, one thing needs to happen: nintendo needs to hit that market with a combination of desperation, imagination and b*lls.

I'm sure they will :)

Post launch periods for the last few Nintendo consoles (notable exclusives):

N64 - Jan-June 1997

Mario Kart 64
Blast Corps
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter
Star Fox 64

GameCube - Jan-June 2002

NBA Courtside 2002 (Jan 02)
Resident Evil REmake (April 02)
Eternal Darkness (June 02)

Wii - Jan-June 2007

Wario Ware: Smooth Moves
Fire Emblem
Super Paper Mario
Mario Party 7

Wii U - Jan-June 2013

LEGO City Stories
Monster Hunter Tri G
Wii Fit U (?)
Pikmin 3
Game & Wario
The Wonderful 101 (?)

There's Dragon Quest X for Japan as well I guess. 

When you can't support your console for months after launch, you know you did something wrong.

(Also, when you put all the pressure on Mario and NintendoLand to sell consoles, you know you did something even more wrong!)

What Nintendo really needed to do was to make sure that there were some 1st party games at launch. I think that Nintendo put too much faith on NSMBU, Nintendoland and third party ports.