I have to disagree. Unless they're going for a blue ocean strategy again (yet to be seen), a 2016 release for a home console makes no sense. Who are early adopters going to be? The people who just bought a Wii U  or the people who just bought the PS4/X1? They'll be entering a competitive market at its peak of competition, with a tarnished name and probably a disenfranchised core audience who were abandoned on the previous system. The question should really be,  whats to be earned by an imminent release? Who is their market going to be and why will third parties support a late thrid wheel?

The current situation is that they're financially stable and have an underperforming home console, thats been the situ for the last 3 years. I don't get why people are acting the Wii U only suddenly became a flop, waiting out bit longer is not going to damage them

What makes you say that? PS3 games still get made and it's unlikely we'll see a PS5 for another 3-5 years. Console lifecycles are getting longer, not shorter.

I'll be the first to say it. It's always a bad idea to announce a new system early. In Nintendo case, they were stuck in a situation where they had two bad choices and they had to choose which choice would be the least devastating. They couldn't hold off on the DeNA announcement since their first set of mobile games are going to be released by the end of the year. I think out of the two choices they had, Nintendo made the correct one. 

Then there's the issue of the NX release date. At this point, Nintendo probably isn't sure when it's coming out. Even if they were, they couldn't make that announcement yet because that would automatically give the Wii U a death date at an early stage in it's life. Announcing a release date next year might be better because Wii U will appear to be much older by then and getting as many sales won't be that much of a priority. Also, if they show off NX next year, but don't have a set date for it's release, that might even be better for Wii U because it would give an impresion of a longer lifespan.

I don't see why people are being so negative about this. The Wii U failed and the Gamepad concept failed with it. There is no reason to keep pushing a console people don't want. Nintendo's internal teams have moved on and will release a lot of games for NX. Everything is pointing towards a 2016 release. They are not going to do a Sega! Sega put out multiple add-ons to their hardware and released a new console at almost the same time. That's not what Nintendo is doing. The Wii U will have a shorter life cycle than usual, but 4 years is still acceptable.

If Nintendo has to decide between a healthy console business + some pissed hardcore fans ("no Wii U exclusive Zelda! Boo!") or bleeding money for years just to keep some fans happy, they should definitely take the first option.

The fundamental problem here is that Wii U's install base is so small, it is hard for Nintendo to make a profit with their games. Pikmin 3 sold less than the Gamecube games but was certainly more expensive to develop. Most games sold less than their Wii and Gamecube iterations but had higher dev costs. The Wii U only has 10 million sellers so far. Sure, they can get along for another year, but what are they going to do in 2017 without a new console for the first 11 months of the year? They would also have to postpone the 4DS launch to 2018 in that case and the 3DS is not gonna live that long with sales regularly below 100k units per week already. Nintendo needs to get their new hardware out in 2016 (+ handheld in 2017) or they risk sliding back into red numbers. That's just the way things work in the console business: The older a console gets, the less software it sells. VGChartz had some great graphs and analysis illustrating this back in the day.

I see nothing.

Less hype.

Announced too early.

Current Gen sales will fall too early.

DUMB. Like most of Nintendo's decisions these days......
It's almost unbelievable they don't see simple business.

Bah, don't wait until E3 next year, do a big unveil in January to prep for an October or November launch.

Well, they'll need to bring a lot of heavy hitters for the NX, so saving them for E3 could really build hype.

I'm expecting the announcement and tech demos at a february event. At E3 the final games and launch window (holiday 2016). Then a Q3 ND with release dates (near TGS) and finally an event for launch, yes, an event. They are going to market this thing maybe at the same level as Wii.

The last (announced) big hitter for Wii U is Zelda, a game that can be ported to NX. Other big games can already been developed on NX ready to launch in 2017.

That's the point. PS360 games were only being made as the PS4/XB1 did not share the same OS and you could not have games easily cross-over. But that is wasted $$. 

Building a platform where new hardware does not deprecate all of the software is where we're headed.