I love when someone tries to blame the Wii for the the Wii U failing. First of all the Wii was never treated like the console leader by the industry so its no surprise that the consoles that got the industry leader type support actually were able to catch up in sales in some regions. This was helped by the Wii having more traditional life cycle as far as when sales peak and start to decline while the PS3/360 both had very slow starts and delayed peaks. Of course Nintendo and just about every other publisher only released about 2 games a year for it from 2010 onwards and it never got the price drop down to $99 it should have had when that happened.
The Wii U is where it is at now because Nintendo fucked up the launch in a major way. The reveal was mess, all the E3's it had were a mess, there was no build up to the release, there was no steady stream strong software to sell, the price is too high, the name is confusing, and people almost a year later are still not sure what it is or not care.
This far removed from the Wii.
I fail to see how this is in any way removed from the Wii. In fact, every single one of your points can be brought back to business decisions made due to the Wii's performance.
- Why did Nintendo fuck up the launch?
Because Nintendo believed that they didn't need to focus on the power of the hardware at all. Why? Because of the Wii. What about the games they launched with? Why did they create Nintendo Land and New Super Mario Bros U as launch titles? Because they wanted to make a new Wii Sports phenomenon occur, this time however, infused with Nintendo IP's as to position those well into the minds of people for when they were going to release separate games for those IPs. NSMB U was one of the best selling games of the Wii, so it made sense for them to bring that out first. All because of the prior performance of the Wii.
Why make a karaoke/dance game as a launch title? Because Just Dance (also a title on which they put extra emphasis on getting to their system as a launch title) and several like it, did so well on the Wii. They stated this in their research reports as to what people were buying mostly on the Wii and other consoles.
- Why was the reveal a mess? From Nintendo's standpoint it made sense. Focus on the controller, just like, you guessed it, they did for the Wii at TGS. Why were all their E3 conferences a mess? They focused on games that did well for the Wii and looked at what the Wii lacked this generation i.e HD games like Call of Duty and an online infrastructure that allows the accompanying DLC to be available for the platform.
- The lack of build up was because the technology just isn't exciting. Because the games aren't exciting. Because the console, displays visuals on par or in some cases, slightly inferior to what people have seen for the last 8 years on Xbox 360 and PS3. Again, all due to the Wii as pointed out previously.
- Why no steady stream of strong software? Well, you can look at the opening post for one answer to that as far as 3rd parties are concerned. And as for Nintendo themselves not having games ready, well they weren't prepared for HD development apparently due to them living in their SD Wii bubble.
- Price is too high. I wonder why, maybe it's the inclusion of that giant tablet controller they were trying to sell to people as the second coming of the Wii remote. They needed a unique angle after all since it worked so well with the Wii.
- A confusing name. Why did Nintendo not see this? They pay people out the ass to think this stuff up and yet they still went with it. Well, perhaps because they thought it was just something to get used to and would garner the same response as the Wii name got with its original unveiling. See Reggie's talk regarding that at the E3 they revealed the console and name.
In consequence it left people confused, sure. But all of this stems from their experiences with the Wii. It certainly doesn't come from nowhere or live in some vacuum. Just like for instance, Xbox One. Microsoft focused on TV at their reveal because of what they saw happening on the Xbox 360, again these are not ideas that come out of nowhere.
tl;dr They dun fucked up cus of their previous experiences with the Wii