The family market IS the Nintendo market. Not the hardcore market.
Good move Nintendo.

The question is how much of that market is left or even needs another $250-$300 console when they already play several hours a week on their phones/tablets for free. 

That will be the problem for Nintendo on this end, Apple/Google/Facebook are not any easier competitors than Sony/MS, maybe even harder truth be told. You can't beat free games. 

The Wii/DS time was different because no one was making games for lapsed/casual gamers, but today smartphone and casual browser games are like 60% of the game market, it's the most over-served segment of the market and there are more people playing games today probably than ever. 

Watching TV I now see like 5x+ more marketing for casual smartphone games than I do for even Playstation/XBox. That would be unthinkable circa 2004. 

when my mother but a wii it was her first console.

i am quite confident it will also be her last console. she is never coming back. i feel the same can be said for most of the market that purchased wiis.

Yeah I have a cousin that's basically in the same boat. I let them play the Wii U and they even had a lot of fun with it, but no interest to buy one. 

The bar for impressing casuals is now sky high, you have to blow their socks off with something so different. It's a tough mountain to climb. 

it's just that gaming isn't in her soul.

example:  i read and have reread several times the entire harry potter series.  i can factually say that harry potter has made up 21 of the last 23 books i have read over a period of the last 10 years.  (the other 2 are game of thrones btw).  i love those book but it in no way turned me into a person that loves to read.

I really hope that's not the case; going after the casual market i a lost cause. It's like you said somewhere in this thread; can't bet free (games). There is no incentive for casuals to buy a gaming system, they already have one in their phones/tablets. Are Nintendo going to compete against Samsung and Apple to make a new phone/tablet? Are they gonna make tons of free games? I hope Nintendo knows what they're doing, or this will be their last gen as 1st party developers

I think you're confunsing the 'casual' markey with the 'familiy' market. Every Nintendo console since the Famicom was mainly targeted at the family market, not just Wii and DS.

It's called Know Your Friends

http://www.polygon.com/2015/2/11/8018585/ubisoft-wii-u-finished-unreleased-game-know-your-friends

Well Ubisoft did mostly push poorly designed shovelware on the Wii back in the day...
Also with over 60M Consoles already out there, the "Core-Market" is a pretty tough target right now, not to mention that it would include Nintendos image completely shifting.
I dont think family is bad per se: Wii and DS were aimed at familys and I loved both.
Maybe I am part of a dying kind, but I like playing together on the same sofa over getting flamed by strangers online.

I actually have a small theory concering the NX:

It could be absolutly nothing, but I think there are some hints to what kind of controller NX will have hidden in Zelda BotW:
The Shiekah Slate is obviously supposed to look like the gamepad, like so many other key-items in so many other Wii U exclusives.
The thing is: The Gamepad is hardly used in the Game!
Aonuma confirmed, the whole Game can be played with the Pro-Controller!
According to people who played the game at E3, the gamepad simply showed the Controls, which was likely done to help improve the demo.
This means that the Gamepads screen will very likely of little importance in the final game!
Coming back to the Shiekah Slate, its obvious that this is not how it was intended to be.
My guess is that many of the actions that are done on the TV during the demo, like scoping, marking targets, the map in general, etc... all used to be executed via the gamepad.
Why change that? Well, the game was announced for an yet to be shown console not that long ago!
A console that maybe, just maybe does not feature a screen on its controller, because the latter likely has more in common with the other controller that can be used to play Zelda BotW: The Wii U Pro Controller!

Agreed, this is a stretch, but I think we can at least take the absence of obvious gamepad-uses as a confirmation that NX will NOT feature a screen on the controller, and while I personally liked the gamepad most of the time, the image it has gotten over the past few years alone is reason enough to ditch the idea.

Well, hopefully the NX does well then