I actually used the system I believe how Nintendo intended ... as a life style device.

I would use the Wii U game pad as my TV remote and quick load into some SNES Virtual Console (F-Zero!) during commercial breaks. I even used the video chat function. It was alright. Miiverse was neat too. 

The thing is the OS was slow (checking sports scores took too long) as Nintendo isn't an OS company.

In a world where the iPad doesn't exist and iPhones didn't proliferate so quickly, there would probably be something there as a living room device, but as that wasn't the case, the Wii U just felt like a lame duck.

The design of the Game Pad was also ugly, it looked like a kid's tablet. Both Nintendo and MS banked hard on the casual lifestyle aspect of the Wii U and XBox One (Kinect) and it backfired badly on both of them.

The ports often are worse than the originals if done cheaply and there's no big power difference. That being said, the problem wasn't the hardware, but the software. Miiverse was constantly running in the background gobbling resources that had otherwise been in use for the games.

While playing it safe is risky as well and Wii was declining in popularity, I unironically think Nintendo could've sold SNES levels or higher with a generic Wii 2.

-Keep the rounded design of Wii U that is similar enough to Wii but make clear right away that it's a new console.

-No GamePad

-2 GB RAM is fine, GPU is fine with what we got IRL, clock up the CPU modestly to make it better than Wii U was and better than Xbox 360 and PS3.

-$249.99 with a 128 GB internal hard drive. 

-Wii Remotes supported for Wii games and select Wii 2 games. The new controller would basically be the JoyCons before the JoyCons in that they're rechargeable but would keep the Wii Remote Plus shape and have the nunchuck wireless. 

-Wait until Spring or Summer 2013 to launch the console. The Wii U sold well at its holiday launch but then plummeted for nearly a year after because of first and third-party droughts. Maybe Pikmin 3 could still come to Wii in this scenario as Holiday 2012 title or early 2013 title since developing it on older non HD hardware would speed up the development. 

-Get Breath of the Wild out November 2016 or before. Breath of the Wild won't be crossgen, so I don't see it needing all the way until March 2017. Still, it's unlikely it will hit Nintendo's initially planned release year of 2015 even in this scenario. 

Contraditory design.

Gamepad was meant to be used to enhance the immersion with a second screen *.
Yet another value of gamepad was to allow to play in a single screen without the TV.
However, both are contradictory. If you desing the game for one of them, you break the other, or the function would be unoptimized.
Media complained: "This game dont use the imersion of gamepad well" or "It wont allow to use in a single screen only". Devs couldnt only port, they should use the gamepad. Even if was not intendet in the game design.
Yet, made the console very expensive

IMHO, the gamepad should be an acessory, like the PSVR was to PS4.
Then, Wii U sould be released earlier (without the extra time they took to design and build games for the gamepad), when the wii fever wasnt dead.
Latter, release th gamepad, with some games.

*Yet some say the having to switch screens break the imersion, it takes you from the wolrd getting you to the real world where you switch screens.

haha, funny to read you say they should have made the gamepad not required, cuz the entire design of the system was around the gamepad! I mean of course I agree, the fact that they designed the system around the awful gamepad idea was why the system failed so miserably. But it would have been silly for them to make the gamepad not required considering the system was entirely designed around that device/concept.

It'd be like if Nintendo launched the Wii and then said "actually forget motion controls" haha, and stopped using the Wii remotes. I mean they sorta did that with the 3D part of 3DS, by offering 2DS, but just being able to view the screen in 3D was never a gameplay feature, it was just a visual feature, so not the same thing at all compared to the WiiU gamepad.

Anyway, not disagreeing, just saying them cutting out the gamepad from the system was never gonna be an option, because the whole point of the WiiU design was the gamepad. They should have just abandoned the gamepad idea in the planning stages of the system. Even if they had just gone with a straight up motion control successor to the Wii that cost $100 less than the WiiU it still would have sold poorly (though not nearly as bad) because the motion control craze and all the non-gamers it brought into the Wii had already died off a couple years before the WiiU even launched.

Their best option, other than coming up with the Switch concept five years earlier than they did, probably would have been a typical console with a huge spec upgrade, a bit less powerful than X1 and PS4 so that it could remain cheap but significantly more powerful than the WiiU, with a normal controller, but that also allowed motion controls with Wii Remotes for any game that wanted to include that and was backwards compatible with all Wii games if you are using the Wii Remotes. Then they could have gotten some slightly downgraded multiplat games, still had fairly impressive specs, still allowed motion controls in games where it is required or improves the game and all the Wii owners wouldn't have to buy new controllers for that, still let people play all their Wii games on the system, and offered it at an affordable price. That probably would have been a >50 million seller assuming they also launched with a 3D Mario or 3D Zelda and kept the big games coming.