My cousin stayed over during the holidays for a week and he brought his Wii U. I was a lot more impressed with it than I was expecting. Even just being able to switch back and forth between a game and the other apps was pretty damn cool. We were collecting all the Star Coins in Mario and would switch back to the browser with a page describing the hidden locations. It worked brilliantly; maybe the load time between apps could've been quicker, but it wasn't unbearable and they're addressing that in the next batch of firmware anyway.
The other game we played a lot was ZombiU. That shit was addictive. In my advanced age, I find I have precious little time to spend on single-player adventure titles anymore. But the way ZombiU is set up, I could play for an hour or so and not even advance that much, but still have a good time trying to survive as long as possible with one character. That's important to me, being able to jump into the game and have fun instead of having to keep track of some poorly-written, overly-complicated story just to understand what I have to do next. I also loved the way the gamepad was utilized, giving a palpable sense of immersion and tension I haven't experienced before in a game. There were a couple things I'd change, like having to click on each object just to scan it, but overall, I came away very impressed.
As far as this past Nintendo Direct went, I'm pretty psyched. It sounds like Zelda is going back to its roots as a free-roaming adventure title, instead of the linear quest of the past few titles. I'd like to be able to just screw around and go at my own pace and direction instead of being trapped in a narrative. The Yoshi game looks gorgeous, and since the director of the originals is supervising, I'm not too worried about it being as simple/easy as Kirby's Epic Yarn was. I was already anticipating W101, and now it's looking even better. Good to hear that we'll be seeing a new 3D Mario, Mario Kart, and Smash at E3 - hopefully that means a 2013 release for at least one of those. I don't necessarily care about WWHD, Bayonetta 2, or the others, but I'm happy for those who do.
So am I getting a Wii U? Yeah, probably in the coming year. I'm really not interested in the other next gen boxes, no matter the rumored specs and the hype. I like Nintendo's games and their philosophy about keeping game development a self-sustainable enterprise, rather than something that's mainly just profitable for the mega-conglomerates who can afford it. I really couldn't care less if Wii U doesn't get all of the 3rd party ports out there, as long as it gets better support than the Wii did (which already seems to be the case), I'm good. I don't want to go the multi-console route again.