All consoles before wii where high tech or atleast contemporary. Incl. nintendos. Even the famicom was high tech when it released back in 1983.
I agree that Nintendo should not be worried about being the highest in tech but being contemporary with what the market wants. If the Wii were doing the same visual effects and polys as Gamecube but pushing them in HD, that would have made it contemporary.
However, saying that Nintendo has a history of being strong in hardware is a bit wrong.
The Famicom/SNES was the weaker system compared to the Master System, with the only feature that it held over the Master System being its ability to scroll visuals.
Aside from that, it was quite weak, but a sales success.
All consoles of the time were
easily bested by arcades and PCs, which were not on the bleeding edge themselves at the time but more in line with the newer available tech.
With the Super Famicom/SNES, it was the weaker console, but supplemented the deficiency with a larger color palette and better sound card than the Mega Drive/Genesis. Devs in Japan seemed to care more about the color palette and sound card.
Aside from those things, it was weaker by a fair margin, but was a sales success.
PCs were already doing 3D graphics and arcades still held the visual advantage.
With N64, they tried to reach for the highest tech... and ended up with severe delays getting it produced, also making some of the wrong choices on what should and should not be sacrificed. Devs and gamers preferred FMVs and the more cinematic experience afforded to them by CD media, which was not a new technology at the time, but had matured to a point where it had become a standard.
N64 would have been last place had Sega not buggered up the Saturn.
This was the generation where the gap almost closed between arcades/PCs and home consoles, but PC graphics saw a huge surge and eclipsed the console once again. The arcade market never widened the gap, which became permanently closed at the start of the next generation.
GameCube is the only time where they found a good middle ground. More powerful than their immediate competition but weaker than the newcomer with deep pockets. Disc format hampered them, but worse than that, they were hampered by an image problem that (get this) no amount of great tech could surmount.
It failed in the marketplace, selling the lowest amount of any Nintendo hardware in history aside from the Virtual Boy.
The arcade's position as ahead of the console curve was dying, as the arcade market was floundering and costs were being cut, using modded home console hardware to power arcade cabinets. Eventually, the arcade market in North America reached the point it's at now, near-death, because it held no advantage over home console hardware anymore.
The PC still had every advantage over home consoles possible.
In summary, Nintendo has a history of not going for broke on specs. In fact, MOST companies have a history of that, Sony included. Nintendo just picked a few feature sets in A/V hardware that people legitimately cared about in the first 2 gens and said to hell with the rest of it. Their market position softened when they went for the highest tech and sacrificed the wrong things to make that happen.
Wii represented a change in strategy, where graphic fidelity was literally the last thing on the table. It was a success, but at an obvious cost.
Wii U brings them somewhere closer to what we saw with the NES/SNES, where they're picking the A/V features they give a shit about and spending the rest of their time improving how you use it.
