Nintendo's mismanaged their console division to irrelevance through consistently bad decision making really from the mid-90s onwards. 

I wouldn't be so sure they know what they're doing. 

Final Fantasy was not a multi-plat. The main FF series was under a exclusive deal with Sony and Squaresoft. Even GTA was not really a multi-plat, MS had to wait and pay to get an old port of it, it was under contract by Sony. 

If that was a problem, third parties wouldn't be making 2-3 disc games for x360.

360 discs weren't nearly as problematic.

I really hope they mean surprise as in go above people's expectations and really blow people away.

Nintendo really should consider the NX a fresh start and try and do everything right this time.

Yeah they were much more problematic. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_console_games_spanning_multiple_discs

48 multi-disc 360 games vs. 22 multi-disc GC games, and no GC game had more than 2 discs, many 360 games had 3 or 4 discs. 

The only way they'd surprise me is to release a console with SNES level 3rd party support. If they did that. I could just buy a Nintendo console and have a PC as a back up.

I think this is less about number of discs and more about choosing a proprietary format that doesn't correspond with industry standards. It stored only 1.5 GB of data versus 4.7 GB on normal DVD's, which gets even worse when dual-layer DVD's are considered, which offer over 8.5 GB storage per disc, there was also a marked difference in speed, DVD's enable a 10.5Mbit read speed while the GC's format was limited so somewhere around the 3.1Mbit region. It also rendered the console unable to play DVD's and something as mundane as an audio CD, causing the format alone to render the whole console useless for media functionality.

Also; the 360 was a HD capable console, games took up way more space due to textures, uncompressed sound and other additions, the GC was released in the SD era, the average game size would be only 1/5 the size back then, if that. Of course there were more multi-disc games on the 360.

The GC's format was by far one of the silliest design choices on the console and a repeat of the whole N64 cartridge debaccle; if you choose to not adapt to industry standards, it makes the process of tailoring software to your consoles more intricate and this is certainly not a good choice for a company struggling to gain/regain support from 3rd parties.

The 360 only stored 8.7 Gb per disc, when bluray was becoming the standard(up to 33Gb) furthermore the advent of HD textures and uncompressed sound makes the 360's situation even worse than the Gamecube's. Most 6th Gen games didn't need the full 8.7Gb and it is evident by GC multiplats only needing two discs, meanwhile PS3 ports required 3-4 discs on the 360. The media argument only has to do with third parties in so much as userbase affects them(people bought PS2 for the DVD player.) 

Yeah, but if Wii U had all the Nintendo exclusives and third party support, who could resist? Unfortunately that is a utopia that will never happen.