Well Philips does use the patent though.
http://www.uwand.com/smartertvgaming/
"The patented uWand technology was initially developed in 1999 from conceptual research into the potential adoption of pointing technologies in a living room environment.
Since then hundreds man-years of work has been invested in pointing research and development by a highly skilled multi-disciplinary team, ranging from engineers, computer vision expert, psychologist, and anthropologist, with a broad understanding of all user interaction paradigms and human behaviour."
So hundreds man-year invested in the technology and nitendo copies it and has almost no r&d cost. Thank god we got patents. Imagine a world without patents no-one would invest in r&d because you can copy ideas for free.
A world without patents would be unfair imagine a company spending a lot of money in research & development and it has to earn it back by including the costs in the price of the product. Than another company just copy paste the idea and basically can put the same product at a lower cost on the market. The company that did all the research could go bankrupt, because the competitor can produce the same product at a lower price.