Fun fact: Europe received roughly 600 fewer Game Cube titles than the USA. 

Is this a joke that Gamecube had no games in Europe since Gamecube only released 600 games?

No, roughly 800 titles were released in the USA for Game Cube europe around 200. or at least those are the numbers I read in a magazine article like 10 years ago.

I agree, to a certain point. I still think some of Nintendo's decisions like the mini-DVD were very stupid. But I'll give Nintendo a slight defense that the 'Cube was only $99.99 from September 2003 onward. That is super cheap for a current-gen console a little less than two years after its launch. 

If Nintendo would've launched the GameCube at $99.99 or likely $149.99 and changed virtually nothing else, I do think it would've sold at minimum the same lifetime units of the N64. Heck, it might even match or surpass the SNES.

You're at the store. You're getting a new game console. PS2 is $299.99, Xbox is $299.99. But the GameCube is half the price. Sure it doesn't have a DVD player or online, but you have a pedigree of Nintendo titles and some multiplats. It would make a very attractive option for kids and adults alike.

The Xbox had 8 texture mapping units. It's Geforce 3/4 derived. It can match the Gamecube on this front.

Though the OG Xbox can handle larger textures due to it's higher system bandwidth and system memory capacity... The Cube had the texture cache and 1T-SRAM to make up some of that difference and can simply sample more textures and layer them appropriately in real time.
Star Wars definitely showcases this advantage for the Gamecube to a great extent.

Definitely. The Gamecube's TEV meant it was a texturing powerhouse, no doubt... And the games showcased that.
But for compute it was a no contest, this was simply one of nVidia's big key strengths at the time, no one would approach nVidia on this front (And we aren't talking raw specs here, but real-world capability) until ATI brought out the Radeon 9700 years later once the 7th generation was underway.

The Xbox being built on PC technology had a more 7th-gen hardware design which emphasized shaders and compute to pull off effects like deferred rendering in Shrek (Something that hit it big with Battlefield 3 during the 7th gen)...

And Ray Tracing in Conker: Live and Reloaded. (Global Illumination.)
In Conker if the normal looks towards the ground, the engine would shoot a single ray from the sky towards the ground and do collision detection with colour encoding calculations performed on the vertices.
Result was the ability for the engine to seamlessly do colour shifting between scenes.

Obviously Conkers implementation of Ray Tracing is rudimentary as it's only running on 6th gen hardware, but hard to ignore the benefits it brought forward.

Since then Ray Tracing has only become more intricate, demanding and impressive.
Conker and Shrek though are probably two of my favorite games that showcases the foundations of the main technologies we rely on today and which define current games and rendering approaches.

It was really forward looking hardware.

But the PS2 sold 150 million copies what are you talking about :p

Yeah because it had a DVD player and people bought it like crazy just to use that. Just like PS3, I knew people that didn't even game that bought it just to have a blue ray played.