I recently spoke to someone about the Wii U. Their excuse for not buying the system is that they are waiting for Homebrew to come out on it. 

There has already been a Homebrew Wii mode for the Wii U released, but not one that can play Wii U games as of yet. There are several teams working on cracking the system to include homebrew. 

Nintendo has apparently made it incredibly difficult this time, however. 

http://wiiuhax.com/category/homebrew/

The team at Wiiuhax.com has been having trouble finding the AES obfuscation on the Wii U bootrom. Nintendo really went out of their way to stop hackers this time around. 

The team at Wiikey has apparently made a breakthrough, but has yet to release it to the public. 

http://www.wiikey.com/news/

In order to perfect it they need more time, but they have put it on hold to work on the PS3 homebrew. Once that is complete, they will resume WiikeU

Now for the original question. Would Homebrew boost Wii U Sales?

I think so

Perhaps, but it would hurt software in the long run.

A lot of times if they pirate it, they wouldn't have bought the game in the first place. There are a few cases where it would hurt software sales though. 

Seeing as that profit comes from software, it wouldn't be very smart

I'm pretty sure that Nintendo would prefer selling a lot of software and a small amount of hardware versus selling a lot of hardware but a minimal amount of software.

Yea but it will kill the software sales dramatically... Just look how the DS did when it got hacked with the R4, the software sales went down like crazy... It's not only about the people that doesn't want to pay for the software, its also about the people who would pay for the software but they have an less expensive alternative

homebrew killeded my bird. say no to homebrew.

That would be counterproductive for Nintendo.

What other people are saying, it would hurt Nintendo since the profit comes from the software. It's inevitable that It'll happen though.