Its interesting the drop in the americas from NES to SNES, the Genesis took a big chunk of its userbase, even if the SNES did outsell it at the end.

Japan is specially interesting, after the PlayStation came out, Nintendo never recovered there, as far as home consoles are concerned, both the PS1 & PS2 sold over 20m over there and even the PS3 wasn't that far off the Wii.

Your tables and graphs show Americas, Japan and Europe, but what about the rest of the world?

The rest of the world for Nintendo is pretty much just Australia and New Zealand, they don't really officially released their products outside of that.

Say, for example if you bought a Nintendo device in Asia, its likely that the store you bought it from bought the consoles from a retailer on Japan or Europe not Nintendo themselves and all these is shipment data, so it shows those sytems shipped in Europe, not sold in Europe.

Australia and New Zealand are part of the PAL system, so I believe their numbers are included in Europe's anyway, could be wrong but that's how Nintendo operates as far as I know.

Sony have always had an advantage here in Europe due to already having an established brand.

When they decided to put Millions into advertising, get the biggest 3rd party titles onto the system and keep the machine at a competitive price they were essentially riding a huge wave of fantastic word of mouth. 

Was waiting for the shipped numbers of WiiU and 3DS, now all Nintendo systems.