I won't actually disagree with you that hacking has little bearing on the popularity of a system, but I will point out that you're jumping around madly. For example, the Gamecube is a full generation before the Wii. Also, you bypassed the Dreamcast which SEGA at least tried to use piracy as the scapegoat to blame for its failure (though anyone with any sense can see the real reasons it failed, number one being their utter and complete lack of any real marketing capabilities whatsoever. Not even anything like Segata Sanshiro on the Saturn, and that's not even the kind of marketing I mean... Heck, even SONY had some idiot dressed up in a bad Crash Bandicoot suit at least, though again that's not really the sort of marketing I'm talking about.)
I do think a truly objective look into how piracy affects things is needed. On the one hand, there are some lost sales, but on the other hand, the assumption that one download equals one lost sale is so fallacious it's vomit-worthy. (Some downloads are people redownloading something they already own with damaged discs, some are people redownloading a deleted download, some are people who try before they buy and then buy what they like, etc etc.) And then, as you imply here, there's the popularity factor. E.g. those who have methods of playing copies tell others about those things and then other people do actually buy them even if the first person didn't. It's very complicated, but it does seem very potentially likely that it actually does more good than harm. Of course, companies must show a serious effort to curb piracy because publishers (particularly AAA publishers who have way too much pull and are way too disconnected from the actual realities of the actual market and the actual people in said market as well as their own developers) but this does beg the question of if they aren't all going too far and for all the wrong reasons since so many do indeed assume one download is one lost sale...
This isn't really a fair comparison. Until consoles started going to CDs making any sort of copies was prohibitively difficult (and illegal clone carts weren't the booming market they became much later around I guess the DS generation as chip production was still a bit costly and difficult to get into initially.) Now, if you consider generation only and forget consoles for a second this puts the lie to the statement. On computers copying was insanely easy and copy protections there predate consoles by far with some things even going so far at times as to utilize an external dongle connecting to the computer as a protection mechanism in a fit of utter paranoia. A lot of early PC games required you to enter text from various points in the game manual or turn a multi-part rotating wheel to match different parts and enter whatever was showing through cutouts. Copy protection is definitely nothing even remotely new and far predates those systems. I think the earliest was actually in the 70s in fact...