Why do people like the fusion idea? That night get some support in Japan, bit western developers will refuse to develop because it's too weak! And again PlayStation and XBox fans will hate and diss on it, making it the birthday monkey of all console jokes again.

Fusion is a unified architecture, this means that they can have a home console (high specs) and a portable (portable specs) that can run the same software but, obviously, at different levels of IQ and frame rates. Right now, the WiiU/3DS are two entirely different and incompatible architectures that require heavy work to bridge (see: Smash3DS), if they were under a unified articheture with two concrete hardware specs, then it would be trivial to code and texturize any one game to run on two seperate systems with two seperate graphical qualities.

If third parties cared about specs, they'd have specs to target. If third parties cared about Nintendo's tens of millions of portable users, they have a userbase to target. More than likely, they won't support it either way because Nintendo consoles don't support the AAA-big budget method of overhyped front loaded sales. Instead you'll see more and more indie or mid-level support that can run everywhere, and Nintendo will only have to feed one channel with its game output which they can do.

They won't need Western developers, they'll be able to supply a pretty steady stream of software constantly for it if their dev resources aren't split between two seperate formats as they have been ever since the NES/Game Boy days. 

I'm not sure if I love the idea, but at the same time I don't think Nintendo can plausibly compete with Sony/MS head on for the hardcore gamer. They just don't have it in them and they certainly don't have the leadership group that knows enough about the console market (which is pretty much now 90+% in the West) to get it done properly. 

In other words, I don't think Nintendo really has much choice left. At least this way they can ensure their top games have access to the widest possible Nintendo fanbase, not like today where most Nintendo hardware sales are on 3DS, but most of their better games are stuck on Wii U and consequently won't be played by most of their fanbase. 

Just crapping out a PS4 caliber console in 2016/17 would largely just be ignored by the Sony/MS fanbase which leaves you with just ... Wii U fans. It won't work. 

Of course its not over yet. It's still too expensive for much of its target audience, and Smash Bros isn't out yet.
If the latter arrives in time for Black Friday, it should do quite well this holiday season.

Define "quite well". If by "quite well" you mean a distant third place and sub-GameCube level sales, sure it'll do "quite well". It did "quite well" last holiday season too. Even saying YoY sales are better well pretty much every console has better sales its third holiday season over its second, so that's some special attribute that applies only to the Wii U (not that it's really that difficult to improve on such low sales to begin with). 

Distant third is by no means guaranteed at this point.

It's gaurunteed. It won't match GameCube sales, so unless Microsoft starts shipping each XB1 with cancer, they will comfortably beat it in the end even if the X1 only sells 30% of what the XBox 360 did. 

If Mario Kart cannot generate extended momentum for a console, then really the truth is they are beyond screwed here. You should be seeing a much stronger response from the market to games like MK8 and 3D World if there was going to be an actual turnaround here. Not just a one month bump to above 100k.

To be honest the first XBox probably would've beat the GameCube by a pretty sizable gap too, it should've hit about 30 million LTD (versus 22 mill for GameCube) but MS yanked it from storeshelves because they were taking too much of a manufacturing loss/unit because of a poor deal they signed with Nvidia and opted to focus on the 360 launch. 

I'm remaining positive regarding the whole matter. A moderately good lifetime is still a possibility. Whether third party support will return is doubtful, however.

Mario Kart did generate extended momentum. We're more than 3 months in and it is still comfortably above its old baseline, even with the console too expensive for the majority of MK's target audience. It's already competitive with Xbone in weekly sales, and still ahead of it in total sales.

i still believe the wiiu will sell around 30 million lifetime ,when its all said and done. :)