No, Nintendo did ponder and tried to answer this question with Wii U, but they only gave the Wii U a slightly more amount of power than Xbox 360. They put one step forward in this case and wanted to satisfy the Wii audience (that left for Smart Phones in 2011) and the other step in just getting decent low cost HD graphics to try to satisfy core gamers.
Nintendo failed in satisfying both the previous Wii audience and the core gamer they wanted to get back with Wii U. Not causal enough and too bulky/slow for a smart phone user, not powerful enough and missing lots of features that the core gamer wanted.
Last year in 2014, consider this, Miyamoto basically said "Fuck casual gamers and good riddance" here:
http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/27/mario-creator-shigeru-miyamoto-preaches-to-the-hardcore-calls-passive-entertainment-pathetic/
Before the Wii, Nintendo was being very competitive with the Gamecube, in fact in many aspects the Gamecube far exceeded PS2 in it's technically achievements. They knew that the console would not sell and not get game parity with the other consoles if the Gamecube was considered "weak" and difficult to port games to. The Wii was a commercial success that the $ made by Nintendo blinded them in thinking they could do it again with Wii U and bring back core gamers that couldn't stand the Wii's low res graphics......
So now going forward to 2016 with the NX, Nintendo has now openly admitted that casuals are not going to buy their hardware, they addressed already the Wii U's technical short comings (CPU mainly but the overall architecture goes with it), and developers who had open talks with Nintendo at E3 (they were witnessed having a lot more meetings than normal this year) are saying to publications like the Wall Street Journal that with NX, they are putting "Industry Leading Chips" in the system in direct response to the Wii U not being able to compete with competitors.
This would be the first time since Nintendo 64 that Nintendo has been touting graphics and processing power so early in development. Even with Gamecube they downplayed the specs (even though Gamecube was a beast), and with the Wii they talked basically only about revolutionary new gameplay and interaction.
Earlier this year, Iwata almost gave away what we have been getting leaks about when he said:
http://www.gamnesia.com/news/iwata-hints-at-nintendo-nxs-new-concept
This "brand new concept" is looking very much like the leaks we have been getting about a console that can have a mobile unit play the same games away from your home. However I do believe that this new console, since it's going to be dedicated to gamers and not casuals, as was specified by them, will in fact be Nintendo going back to being competitive with the Tech they put into the console. A "Gamers Console" needs to have all the bells and whistles to have game parity
and get an edge over the other gaming consoles to be successful.
I think Wii U = "Ok, ok I get it now" for Nintendo with the NX.