Nothing Nintendo has done the last 2 generations would have been limited by being 3rd party. They could just have easily created peripherals for the X360/PS3 or X1/PS4 rather then building a less powerful machine that had the peripherals tied to it.

The other reasons really are poor.

Hardware lasts - I get what you are saying, but the last generation the Wii died and bascally the industry abandoned the platform.  So the hardware lasted, but the industry moved on. Same thing happening with the Wii U. It will be lucky to have a 5 year lifespan.

Innovation - They all bring innovation, Nintendo just tries to lock you in to thier underpowered console to get it when the innovation has nothing to do with the console itself.

They squeeze every penny out of your wallet by building weak hardware (comparitivly) to play Nintendo and mostly only Nintendo software.

Backwards compatibility is a recent competitive move by Nintendo that hasnt panned out.

Item 5 is speculation. Of course they need to execute on going 3rd party.  Doesnt mean they cant and since everyone (in Nintendo forums) believe Nintendo was far better at execution the Sega ever was then they should be able to do it.

Sega wouldn't have gone third party if they had Nintendo's nest egg of several billion dollars and the option of a still half way decent portable game division though. Look at Nintendo's financials -- more than half of their revenue comes from hardware.

People expecting them to go software only will be waiting a long time.

The Wii could not be achieved with the PS3, selling peripherals in a Third Party console, that would work just in their games. No way that would catch, even the Wand in the PS3 did not catch.

In the end, I don't care where they end up as long as the system is capable and their next Smash Bros, Pokemon Mario, and Zelda games continue to be awesome. That said, I rather they stay in a Nintendo console because they are easily affordable early on and their internet is getting better while still being free.

Except most of the Nintendo DS models. The hinges weren't sturdy enough, the shoulder buttons stopped working after the first years and many units had 2 screens with different color temperatures.

But they improved the quality with the 3DS models, especially the 3DS XL has a much better build quality.

The Wand did not catch on because it was late to the party. I am 100% sure that had Nintendo released the peripheral for the X360 and the PS3 in 2006 or 2007 with Wii Sports it still would have taken off.

or they ust dont wanna be seen with a nintendo console. 

I wouldn't mind a Sony-Nintendo alliance where they work together on consoles + handhelds, but I think it would be too difficult to reach a deal.

If Sony proposed a setup kind of similar to the Blu-Ray Forum where third party royalties are shared and Nintendo gets a cut of controller/accessorie sales I could maybe see it, but they probably would be hard pressed to get to a number both companies would be happy with.

If people are SO willing to buy and play all these games, they have more than enough reasons to spend little money and buy a nintendo console.

I do NOT think these games would sell so much better on PSX and XboxX (meaning X as a variable number^^). If those people really wanted them, they would buy WiiU, but they dont. Many people dont want those kind of games.

Its always about people complaining like "I want to play 10 Nintendo games, but I dont want to buy Nintendo console". That makes no sense at all - to be honest i would call it even "stupid". Aren't 10 games enough to justify buying a console for them? If I wanted to buy and play 10 Sony games, I would need to buy the Sony console. Easy as it is ... I dont want, so I dont do.

I even would agree with generic-user-1 - "or they [j]ust dont wanna be seen with a nintendo console."

Thats it ... just think about some 12-14 year old child playing "cool and adequate" *cough* games like CoD, AC, BF and more with their friends and then let them tell their "homies" about owning a Nintendo console and liking Mario and Pikmin. That would be such a WTF-moment for the others as the contrast between CoD&Co and Mario&Co could not be any bigger. I really really expect he would be heavily laughed at. Nintendo is not the definition of "cool" and teens who are not "cool" can quickly become outsiders. "wannabe-cool" teens can be pretty merciless.

Teens wanna belong to something ... so they adapt others attitudes and so can be influenced quite a lot.

Of course its not everything about teens, but i think they are a pretty large part of the Sony and MS userbase.

@Topic:

1) agreed - the hardware is almost "unbreakable". But i guess its not much worse for Sony and MS except some exceptions like RROD and LYODD.

2) agreed - the do not try to do the same as the others do, they try to be different to give the consumer a bigger choice how they want to play. Unfortunately most people just prefer normal controller. And i guess this will not change for quite some time. Everything new is at the beginning generally bad. I really really loved the seperate controllers WiiMote+Nunchuck. That was very relaxing to play with as you could hold them (for games not needing the pointer) as you wanted.

3) well - i would like to have either cheaper VC-Games or an VC-games-flatrate. The VC is among the worst features of WiiU. It is getting massively neglected. Without ever having had any Sony console/handheld, I really much appreciate their PS+ system. The more Sony consoles you have got, the more you get. Even if there are mostly only quite a few games among the PS+-deals I am really interested in, there would be - in average - at least 1 game in 2 Month I would consider to play. That you need it to play online is some bad side, but you get a good value for it.

4) agreed - this is, besides low power consumption and a very quiet console, one of the most important points for me. I did not really played a lot GC-Games on Wii and not lot of Wii-Games on WiiU, but I could. I am not really much into gaming at all anymore ... mainly lack of time ... The one thing i would love is to be able (NOT forced!) to install the games on WiiU to make the disc drive not being that noisy. To me when playing a disc based game on my WiiU this sound is the limit. Sometimes i really hate it. I do not know how anybody could stand early X360 noise - I also had one and loved to install the games.

5) It would be really strange seing Nintendo games on non-nintendo consoles. I dont really like the idea. I fear that Nintendo then would make less experiments and more concentrate on their bigger IPs only. I guess this would be kind of lose-lose situation for nintendo and all of their fans out there and some lose-win situation for nintendo and the "other" gamers. They would need to buy one console less to be able to play all of the games, BUT ... see the start of my post ;)

I really much would miss nintendo without having an own hardware. Something accompanying me since more than 20 years now, would suddenly disappear. I could not compare it to anything else - maybe if my city (its not a big one^^), where i live since my day of birth, just would get demolished.

you mean 3rd partys...