It's good that there's no arbitrary points value assigned to them. It'd be neat if there's a framework they fit into, like Playstation trophies. They could do interesting things in conjunction with Miiverse and the many social systems built into Wii U.
Still don't get the freaking out over achievement systems if you don't care about them. It requires literally no effort to ignore them. It requires more effort to get mad at them.
Nintendo has had the equivalent of achievements in their own games before. They even added them to Find Mii.
Wario Land Shake It also had a detailed achievements system that involved a lot of tricky coals for each stage in the game.
What Nintendo seems to dislike is the idea of online leaderboards and broadcasting accomplishments. They're too afraid that someone's going to feel bad (it literally is that asinine).
But, the preview images for NSMB U actually show people's Mii's bragging about completion times for levels on the world map, so they may have finally caved in.
