... so what, you think they should just stop making consoles altogether? What, am I just going to throw out my Wii whenever it gets around to breaking and start playing Zelda and Mario on the Xbox? Zelda RRoDing ... that's an interesting concept.
No, Nintendo should continue to make consoles. They should just try to approach their console design differently. You say they should stop making them, just because they're shitty? I think they should learn from their mistakes, change their direction, and start going somewhere else with it. They have the ability to come out with anything they want, why give that away when you can accomplish great things with it? Just because they've been failing at that recently doesn't mean they should stop trying. If you innovate, if you create new things, of course you're going to get a lot of duds, that's just the way the world works. But you keep trying until you make something brilliant.
And you can't say the Wii isn't brilliant. Say what you want about the terrible controls, I completely agree with you on that front. But think beyond that for a second. The Wii changed the game, it introduced a whole new and extremely large customer base to video games that just wasn't here before. You can't deny that the Wii has had a gigantic and wonderful impact on our community, and so what if that impact wasn't technological? The WiiU, as much as I dislike the thing (and I really really dislike that goddamn thing), seems to be the second step in the process: The Wii drew the non-gamers in, the WiiU starts to change them into hardcores. Think about it. Better graphics, more of a controller-like design, less focus on motion controls ... it's less of a `waggle stick' and more like a six-axis with a touchscreen. The one after the WiiU, then, will most likely look a lot more normal, if I'm interpreting this correctly. Also, the WiiU controller seems to me to be quite handheld-y or iPad-ish, which tells me that they're probably trying to draw in the people who play games strictly on their phones, and/or they're trying to get the casuals primed to enjoy their next handheld, and eventually get them into handheld gaming.
But I don't really know, this is just my theory. In the end, the market will decide. But yeah, so without Nintendo there wouldn't be that godforsaken wii controller. Without Apple there wouldn't be the damn iPad either ... although without Apple, only about two percent of us would probably be using computers at all, by this point, and the internet would be a very different place. Because the value of things depends on both the thing itself and the impact of the thing on society. And if anything, I think Nintendo has the latter one down.