52 million 3DS

versus

10 million Wii Us

80% of Nintendo fans choose the handheld over the console as is. And the ratio was the same for the GBA versus the GameCube. Wii is an outlier becuase it attracted casual players (mostly women), but even there the DS outsold the Wii by a huge margin. Heck if we go back even further we see the Game Boy/Color massively outsold the N64 as well. 

Basically since Sony has entered the game business, Nintendo's consoles have certainly become no.2 in the sales pecking order for Nintendo. It's not even close really. 

If Nintendo is dropping their traditional portable business, they may as well just go third party honestly. It would be akin to Sony ditching consoles in favor of the PSP/Vita business. 

It wouldn't be exactly like that because the console market hasn't gone through a major change (the introduction of smart devices). Nintendo may have a plot to focus their casual games on smart devices while doubling down on a hardcore home console (Miyamoto himself has mentioned how they need that audience because it is less fickle) for their AAA teams.  We could even see Nintendo licensed tablets and phones taking the place of traditional handhelds. Not saying this is likely, but possible. I'm not ruling anything out for NX, except the recent patents indicate it's definitely not handheld - only.

Yes, it certainly could.

Look I didn't mean to be that mean lol.  But AMD has already confirmed to be working on a new, FULL, console.  From where I am sitting, the OP just looks like a regretful Wii U owner clinging to his purchase and hoping it wasn't a waste.  Honest to god that is what I am hearing right now.

I don't own a WiiU and have never owned a Nintendo console. It was just something I'd been thinking about for a couple of months and decided to share my thoughts.

Then I misjudged you ;).  But either way I find this scenario wildly unlikely, and frankly stupid.  I don't mean that in an insidious tone, just that it would never work in any useful way.

I'm expecting realistically a 250-300 GFLOP handheld, and a micro-console that reuses that similar CPU/GPU tech in the handheld, just scaled upwards by a factor of 2-3x (so 600-900 GFLOPS). That should be enough to allow for some PS4 ports, still be cheap, and allow for decent scalability for all software titles so that they can play on both form factors. 

The lead on the Wii and Wii U has been promoted to the head of Nintendo's hardware division, and his philosophy is on low-power consumption, small form factor, etc. etc. So I wouldn't expect anything too crazy, while it's fun to speculate about a super-console from Nintendo I doubt realistically it's coming. 

It wouldn't really be able to compete with the PS4/X1 anyway, it's far too large of a headstart for the other two for Nintendo to be anything but a distant third place. They'd have to make a console comparable to the PS5/XB2, and release that before the other two. And that realistically isn't going to happen either. 

It would be expensive and Nintendo's designers probably don't even want to leave the PS3/360 graphics level, they're just getting settled in to that now (Sony/MS had 6-7 years in that zone, Nintendo won't leave after just 4, if they had their wish they'd probably continue on with that graphics fidelity for 3-4 more years). 

I'm not suggesting a super console or an expensive console here. I'm simply suggesting that the focus of NX is going to be the core gamer, and it's going to be a full fledged home console, no micro machine.  It may or may not be fairly powerful, it may or may not have a handheld variant. But I do have a suspicion that Nintendo has re-allocated resources from say a 40% handheld 60% home split (even though the cheaper to make handheld games sold more) to something like a 25% mobile 75% NX unified core platform.  The mobile games, if done right, could potentially exceed the profits of the former handheld division using less resources. The NX division, with greater resources than either previous dedicated device, could potentially compete better for core and western gamers.  I think that is going to be its focus.

The director and supervisor of the Wii and Wii U hardware was basically following Takeda's orders. All he did was see the project through and made sure Takeda's instructions went on. He was NOT the reason why Wii and Wii U were underpowered. Now that he's the lead, who knows what we'll see.

I dunno man... stop asking me questions, get out of my face!