Question: Who's the bigger F up, Nintendo or Sony?
I'm going for Nintendo here.
While Sony may have a lot of problems, they are for a large part due to manufacturing difficulties caused by supply issues, which is something they don't have complete influence over. Nintendo on the other hand has a console that is very cheap to produce and is clearly geared towards the non-gamer with minigame collections and non-games as some of the most prolific genres on the console. Yet what they are doing is selling the thing at a price that, while netting them a significant profit, puts them well outside the impulse buy and mainstream price range.
With such a cheap console it would have been quite advantageous to capitalize on having it at mainstream pricing right from the get go. This, combined with a unit that would be easy to produce in significant numbers, could have given them a massive install base early on. And as we all know, if you get that, there's a domino effect which would give them more 3rd party support, which in turn makes more people interested in the console, and thus makes for more consoles sold.
It's really a missed opportunity if you ask me.