Yeah sure, stock limits always cut short what demand could be. So, we may speculate that for a march release for Wii the stock could have been sufficient. We don't know.

And no, the real march that came after is different, because the early buyers generated word of mouth advertising.

so in germany there are no supply issues , here you can buy it everywhere and everytime.

As expected. It's very unlikely that the Switch will outsell the Wii, but it's even more unlikely (pretty much impossible) that it won't outsell Wii U.

That's not a fair comparison. Germany is like Europe's UK. They all hate Nintendo.

It should be mentioned that these are shipment numbers and unlike Switch and Wii the Wii U was heavily overshipped at first due to Nintendo overestimating the demand for the Wii U. Looking at sold through numbers of the Wii U it didn't sell through 3 million units of those shipments till June 2013 almost 6 months after it's release. Of course though Wii and Switch would be much much closer to those shipment numbers due to their more extremely high demand causing very high sell through rates of every shipment and therefore have shortages and problems finding any consoles.

The Wii was, IMO, an anomaly for Nintendo (in the home console market) It was innovative and gimmicky at the same time but it brought gaming to casuals like no other, way before mobile gaming on phones. As many have pointed out, the Switch has what it takes to surpass the Wii U easily but I think it will be hard for Nintendo to replicate the success of the Wii anytime soon. Still, if it ends up selling 60M, 70M or 80M, that's a return to form for Nintendo. This will probably mean that the life cycle for the Switch will be short cause PS5 and XB2 (??) are gonna come in the next 3-4 years and I assume those will leave the Switch in the dust in terms of...everything.

Sony, on the other hand, is on it's way to pass PS3 sales easily but more than likely settle well below the PS2. I personally feel they just get down to brass tacks, powerful consoles with killer software. They dabble in 'innovation' or gimmicks like PSMove and PSVR but at the end of the day, those are added peripherals, they never define the console itself. It's not trying to be hybrids or gimmicky or innovate in its hardware, it's just a solid console that includes as many games for as many types of gamers are humanly possible and that, to me, spells consistency. They are prone to bone headed moves like selling a console FOR $600!

The fact that both systems suffered significant supply issues makes any kind of comparison between the two consoles pretty pointless at this point. All this really demonstrates is that Nintendo has been less able to supply Switchs compared to Wiis, due to tighter component shortages.

The only reasonable thought one can take away from this comparison is that the Switch is, like the Wii, struggling to meet demand even nearly 5 months after launch. For the moment, that's a pretty good situation for Nintendo to be in. 4.7 million in 4 months in the middle of the year is a damn good number.

If it wasn't beating the Wii U, that'd be embarrassing! I don't think it'll end up beating the Wii in the long run, though I do see it surpassing the NES.

perhaps it will pass the snes too

Well, it'd have to surpass the NES to surpass the SNES.