Why not? Sounds like good marketing to me. In fact Nintendo just tried to pull that one didn't they??
Probably were sold out in places. Just remembered going to our local store around launch to check it out and a friend of mine snapped one up. Wasn't like Wii level, where there literally weren't any available anywhere for months. US may have been different of course.
Edit: This is really irrelevant to the thread though. I'm not having a pop at 360 or anything.
Well everything that's been said about shortages has been in reference to the US market. So yeah that could effect the experience.
Still, the OP used NPD numbers to form his opinion, so I think it makes sense to look at the topic in that context.
Edit:
I'd like to pose a serious question. What do you think nintendo will do if Wii U doesnt get the support it needs for 3rd parties to hang on? PS4 and 720 come along, set the world on fire, Wii U fails to catch on for various reasons but Nintendo still releases its own 1st party games. IMO at worse Wii U could do worse than gamecube. If this happens will it even make financial sense for nintendo to produce 1st party titles? Or would they scrap the whole project and start fresh in 3 or 4 years kinda like the original xbox?
They will likely try to do what they could to make the hardware profitable. Cost of manufacturing is usually tied to things like die size and yields associated with that size. Smaller die sizes is an option but the yields would likely suffer, which would actually drive cost of the hardware up. So they can do what they could to improve yields for 32 or 28nm, which would eventually drive the cost of manufacturing down and hopefully make the hardware profitable at it's current price.
By doing this, they should do ok with their 1st party titles and what 3rd party titles they do receive. This is assuming the hardware and software sell though.
MS dropped the Xbox so fast because they would have never profited off the hardware and couldn't continue to compete with Sony in price. The same isn't true for Nintendo and the Wii-U.