The WiiU is a great console, it's just not a great console for it's current price ($300-$330).
For $400 you can get a PS4 that will support all the latest and best games at the highest quality, a robust online/digital service, 500GB hard drive, voice chat, sharing, free games for a month via PS+, and much more.
For $300 you get an underpowered WiiU (only slightly more powerful than the $200 PS3 or X360) with virtually non-existent third-party support, a single game, a gimmicky and poorly supported tablet controller, a behind-the-times internet service, no voice chat, no sharing, overpriced virtual console games, and a 32GB hard drive which severely limits digital downloads.
That said, Nintendo first-party games are unparallelled in quality and fun-factor, and would be well worth a $200 price tag alone. Even $250 would be fair, but it's hard to stomach spending $300+ for a console that is arguably a worse value than a $200 console from the previous generation and only $100 less than a next generation console. Relying on refurbs to bring the console down to a reasonable price isn't acceptable.
EDIT: If Nintendo wants to truly turn around their fortunes with the lowest possible effort, they should release a WiiU 2.5 with the same technical specs, full backwards compatibility, get rid of the tablet controller and include a pro controller by default to lower the price, and rename it to Wii 2 or something easily distinguishable. As it is, even if they become profitable, it doubt it will ever sell more than 20+ million units during it's lifetime.