Well the box mainly showed off the tablet (though the console itself is on the image as well so who knows), so I think he just went "meh" and put it in the closet without looking too closely at it.  He obviously never bothered to try it out lol.

I could not tell you the details about how that went down.  After he told me I just laughed at him and we moved on to the next topic (think he was trying to get me to play Injustice 2 at the time).  He was someone I had become friends with through work, not someone I knew at the time he would have been gifted it.

While true, that is not at all what he was insinuating with his comment.  So with that in mind, your reply isn't exactly relevant.

I have seen a lot of people online that had no idea what a WiiU really was for a good portion of its life.  This was just one example of many people that I decided to share, because it was the instance that I had seen first hand.

I also know multiple people who weren't aware of Wii U but were very much aware of the Switch and saw it as a Wii successor.

I suspect a significant number of Switch owners are Wii owners who skipped over Wii U.

That would be me right there.

Important to clarify, it's not that we don't have cognitive ability to set two different systems apart, it's a simply matter of not knowing Wii U existence

Wii U was released when YouTube and social media wasn't as present as today. To discover about a new console we either need to be advertised about it or discover through world of mouth. Wii U was so unsuccessful that I don't have a single acquaintance who owned the system, i.e. no word of mouth. Except by die hard Nintendo fans, console system followers and people from countries where Nintendo advertises massively on TV, newspapers and so on (like USA, Japan and maybe western Europe) the Wii U was so uneventful that is more likely that costumers didn't notice the system retail release at all

I would also add, that if you not are particularly interested in a topic, but occasionally buy an item, you might not realize new releases. For instance, I don't know about each new graphics card releasing, because of lack of interest. Still I obviously use one in my computer. A die hard fan might follow the releases at Nvidia and AMD closely though. But what I notice are only the standouts. The standouts in consoles for Nintendo were Wii and Switch. I can easily believe that even people that bought one or the other never noticed the WiiU.

Thats so weird. If they own a switch they now a console owner. Would they say the same about playstaion. 60% of ps onwers dont own anothwr console

I don't remember having ever seen a single Wii U add anywhere. The marketing was a complete fail.

Contrary to the insistence of "hardcore" Playstation/Xbox users that it's a secondary/complementary system, I think Switch well and truly has the library to stand on its own as one's primary system by this point.

I don't own a PS4 or an Xbox One and I'm struggling to keep up with all the games coming out on it.