It was a competent platform. It tried to hold its own against the likes of the PS4/XBO but in reality it was more inline with the PS360 before it. It should have been the wii that people wanted.

I always wondered what would've happened if Nintendo had released an actual "Wii 2" with straight up technological progress. Because that's what Christensen proclaims in his theory of disruptive innovation: Companies are supposed to move upmarket, not abandon their strategy like Nintendo did with the Wii U.

A system with no gamepad but more efficient hardware. Better motion sensing technology. A wireless nunchuck with actual gyro capabilities. Better pointer capabilities. Add a microphone and a camera to the sensor bar (nothing crazy like Kinect, just a decent camera. Sort of an evolution of Eye Toy on the PS2). Maybe additional sensors like a heart rate sensor.

This would've enabled new gameplay possibilities (a Tetris or Luigi's Mansion or Eternal Darkness game that gets more hectic the higher your heart rate goes, Nintendogs via camera + microphone, Eye Toy like games, better light gun titles, new Wario Ware and Rhythm Heaven games, games that use the microphone in general, etc.), would've forced Nintendo to release actual new entries in their established "Wii" series of games (instead of releasing HD remasters of Wii Sports and Fit lol) and would've clearly been Nintendo moving upmarket with their vision of the Wii. Also, the console certainly could've been $50 cheaper while still being 20% more powerful, since the Gamepad was really expensive to produce and a lot of R&D costs went into making the second screen have less latency. I'm sure such a console would've sold at least 50 million units, probably more.

If the architecture was actually easier to develop for, third-party games could've helped the slow roll of first-party games. Alas, the third-party on Wii U failed to captivate players from AAA games to tiny games.