It's semi portable as I can walk around several rooms and game without being tied to any physical cord.

Aka. Hybrid.

In technology a hybrid is a device that takes some or all of the functions of two different devices and combines them into a single device. A washer/dryer combo or a V-22 Osprey are good examples of hybrids. A smartphone is a hybrid of a Phone, Computer, MP3 Player, and Digital Camera. I get what you are trying to say here. You are trying to say that walking around your house while playing is a function of a portable. And since Wii U combines that function and the home console function, it is thus a hybrid. I disagree with that though, because doing something poorly does not make a hybrid. A washer designed to spin your clothes out, at extreme speeds, until they are just slightly damp wouldn't qualify as a hybrid. An MP3 player with Wi-Fi calling (edit: and no ability to connect to a phone tower) wouldn't qualify as a smartphone. 

The WiiU has a TV display output as well, which is a key feature of a hybrid console.

Yes, having TV display output is a key feature of a hybrid. We agree, but you said it as if it somehow damages my argument. What's your point? 

No. All perfectly relevant.

How so? Explain. 

Either way, Switch is a console with a heavier emphasis on being a portable gaming device, where-as the WiiU has a heavier emphasis on being a fixed home console.

No, Switch does both equally well. We've had three generations of Nintendo home consoles (Wii, Wii U, Switch) being weaker machines than the contemporary competing home consoles. So as far as the Nintendo home console aspect is concerned Switch doesn't cut corners. Wii U on the other hand is a pseudo-portable, with only a very small selection of mainline Nintendo games actually having the off-TV play functionality. Most Nintendo games required both the gamepad screen and the TV screen to play. I can't speak for non-Nintendo games though, because Wii U had terrible 3rd party support that I didn't get into. 

You calling the Wii U a portable is as wrong as trying to call a motorcycle with a sidecar a car. 

Or trying to call this thing being dragged by a motorcycle a car. 

I own both.

Same. Hopefully they can finish porting the last four good games from Wii U over. That way my Wii U can be like...

My and Pemalite's disagreement cuts to the core of what Nintendo did wrong with the Wii U. It's like they wanted a cherry that tastes like an orange, but forgot about the key aspects of being fruit. Their end product was a piece of tree bark from a cherry tree that smelled faintly of oranges. 

That is exactly what the Wii U tried to achieve and what the Switch succeeded with.
It just had inherent technological limitations which limited it's mobile range.

The main difference with the Wii U is that Nintendo tried to take a home console and sprinkle portability into it... Where-as the Switch Nintendo took a portable console and tried to sprinkle fixed-home console into it.

Both approaches make them Hybrids.

I have my Wii U in the lounge room and will happily play Zelda: Breath of the wild in two rooms over in bed... Without a TV. You can't do that with an Xbox or Playstation natively.

How well something does/doesn't do is ultimately irrelevant. If I bought a washer with a dryer function and it failed to dry my clothes, it would be classed as a washer only.

The Switch is absolutely a rubbish device for a fixed home-console, but a terrific portable one, but we still classify it as a Hybrid.
The WiiU is a rubbish portable console... And arguably a rubbish fixed console later in it's lifespan from a hardware perspective.

The WiiU can certainly be classed as a semi-portable device.

You tried to frame the Switch as being unique with this feature, which it certainly is not.

The Switch and Wii U actually have allot in common when you think about it from a design philosophy standpoint.

Both have a tablet-like form factor with controls strapped to the side of a display... Just one has the processing hardware in a base station and streams it to a display... Where-as the other has the hardware in the display part of the device and streams it to a base station/dock.

That not all Switch devices are hybrids.

No. The Switch is terrible at being a fixed console, it's underpowered for the task... The portable display tends to hide allot of it's power deficiencies.
Heck, some Switch variants are useless at being a fixed console entirely which omit such capability entirely.

The WiiU released at a time when it was going up against the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, so for that it didn't do to bad, sadly Nintendo released it at a time when we were starting to talk about next-gen consoles, which it fell short of.

You do recognize that the WiiU is "pseudo-portable" - Meaning it's a Hybrid of several console approaches. (Fixed and Portable.)

And no, I am not calling the WiiU a pure portable machine. It's a hybrid with limitations.

I am trying to avoid double buying Wii U games for Switch. Plus Wii U is cheap to collect for at the moment.

What I would really like is for Nintendo 64 and Gamecube Virtual console on Switch!

Actually agree with you here. It's a failure on Nintendo's behalf on communicating what their device was ultimately supposed to be.

Not killing Wii too early, not rushing Wii U, equipping it with larger RAM, like thei did with NS, and making the tablet controller display one inch smaller to keep it handier, and cheaper too.

Actually, sales DO matter on profit when you have a company the size of Nintendo with billions of USD cost in annual expenses which include salary, taxation, operating expenses, corporate expenses, utilities/machinery/travel/property, licensing, R&D, marketing, etc. Most of which was dedicated to their home console business, not handheld. It happened that handheld generated many times more revenue and was able to prop up the company while the home console business failed.

For example, Nintendo's R&D for their home console business alone in 2004 was 180M USD (of a total of 191M USD that year), Gamecube cost 99$USD at retail, and sold 3.92M for the year - R&D alone is valued at HALF of the total Gamecube hardware revenue.

Sorry, Gamecube was nowhere near profitable.

All they really needed to do was name it something else and deliver more system sellers at the same caliber as BotW, Mario Odyssey, and Fire Emblem Three houses. Also a better ad campaign would have gone a long way as well. 3rd parties really did not abandon it till sales dropped off (didn't take long), so I like to think it still would have gotten decent support if Nintendo did not lean too much on the Wii namesake and gave more system sellers.

The WiiU had some great games, but lacked a decent number of huge system selling titles.

'Hybrid' is nothing but useless marketing nonsense when applied to technology. If Switch is a hybrid then PS4 is an incest baby.

I think the Wii U could have succeeded if it actually had a decent marketing push and games that made use of its features. But without that they should have just called it Wii 2, maybe made gave the nunchuck an IR sensor too. Without the cost of the gamepad, they could have either boosted the performance to somewhere between 360 and PS4 or launched it at 200.

Not sure whether a second IR camera would work well as two cursors on screen just sounds confusing. 

I honestly think the Gamepad was just a lost cause and no amount of games making use of it could make it appealing, consumers simply didn't want it. 

That said, I like the sound of your Wii 2 for $200 sans Gamepad, that's pretty much what I would've done too.

I've only read the first 25 or so posts. I disagree with few things.
-I don't think the Wii U was a GameCube 2. The Gamecube was a "normal" console with powerful hardware and decent third party support. The Wii U was a bit of a mess. I just don't know any other way to say it.

-Some people say they should have just stuck to the Wii route. I also disagree. While awesome at the time and still improved upon to this day, the motion control trend was on the decline. Nintendo couldn't have known this while developing the Wii U. Hell, Microsoft banked everything on Kinect as well. People just preferred what already worked.

-As for re-purchasing VC games, you actually kinda did. You just got a super discount. I think games were like $1.50 if you already had them on the Wii. Wii Ware was free, though.

Hindsight is 20/20 they say but I just don't know what Nintendo could have done. I just know that (while I personally really enjoyed the Wii U) releasing a console that was less capable than 8 year old machines already on the market was a bad idea. Releasing at a higher price point was a bad idea. Naming it after a brand that was already fading or left a bad taste in people's mouths was a bad idea. Letting 3rd parties carry your launch lineup was a mistake.