I love the Master System, but I have to go with the PS3.

The stereotype that people bought a Wii, played it once, and never touched it again doesn't hold up to factual scrutiny; the system had an attach rate of 9 games per console, you don't buy 9 games for something you only played once.

Nor does Wii U's failure indicate Wii customers were unsatisfied, simply that the Wii U wasn't a worthwhile successor.

Mega Drive is by far the top runner up in my experience. I actually enjoyed it more than the SNES for nearly half the generation. Why? The neon darkness style in many of the early games defines the early 16-bit gen for me. I was also more impressed with Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2 than I was Super Mario World → world was smoother than 3, but didn't feel as sharp (just my humble opinion, I understand a lot of people like SMW more than 3, I'm not one of those). I found Sega had the juice in this era...

...until DKC, that is. SNES's peak in the mid-1990s was, IMO, the strongest Nintendo had been until the launch of the Wii and DS Lite... with maybe the exception of the year of Super Mario 3... Although, I think Pokemon/GBC/GBA fans probably had a much different experience.

Okay, with an attach rate of 9 games per console that's around 900 million games sold. Let's say 30 million people are die hard Nintendo fans and buy 20 games each. That's 600 million games, leaving us with 300 million for the remainder of customers. Now let's say that 20 million people are buying 12 games each. That's 240 million, which leaves us with 60 million games for the remaining 50 million customers. That would be an attach ratio of 1.2 for the remaining 50 million customers. So yeah, it's completely possible that 30 million Grandmas bought a Wii and threw it in the closet. And at 87 million PS3's sold all it would have taken was 13 or 14 million unsatisfied Wii customers to make PS3 the pragmatic winner of the 7th gen. 

Keep in mind the above is all just an example. Remember that an attach ratio of 9 doesn't mean that every customer bought 9 games. It's an average. 

Do you have any actual evidence to support any of this though, or is it all just conjecture without any factual basis?

I only need to prove that it's possible, not that it actually happened. And it is indeed possible to get a system attach ratio of 9 with my example spread or a similar spread. You can't make a deductive argument and then ask for proof when someone points out a perfectly plausible possibility. It's like finding 24 eggs missing from a grocery store and exclaiming that "Only 4x6 can equal 24. Therefore, there must have been 4 customers each buying six eggs." And then when someone points out that 2x12 also equals 24 you suddenly want proof of two egg cartons being sold. 

I mean if we're just making up baseless assertions, I could just as easily claim that most PS3 owners were unsatisfied and that therefore it actually came third place behind 360.

I actually thought it was common knowledge that the Wii was a disappointment to the majority of people that bought it, leading to the Wii U failing hard. I like the Wii, but that's because I'm one of those gamers that takes the time to find the good games on a system. I also happen to like the Sega CD for example. Yeah, I guess my claim that most Wii customers were disappointed was baseless, or at least based on anecdotal evidence of talking with other gamers over decades. Anyway, I'm not going to derail this thread, so let's leave it at that. 

I'm sorry, but this is just nonsense: Curl introduced a statistic which suggests strong average consumer attachment to Wii, and your response comes off to me as you will delegitimize whatever statistic he could ever pull up because extraneous variables and endless possibilities exist. That's not a very productive nor healthy way to engage in discussion

I agree that Curl's stat isn't the end-all-be-all, but I'm also not going to thereby conclude that it is totally useless as a consequence, as you do here.