Great response to my great reponse....lol. I agree with you fully on the PC....but it is sort of a sperate beast as a gaming platform because it is really viewed by most as not a gaming platform or used for that in a secondary fashion. Steam has been a mixed blessing but alteast they have found a way to 'compete' against nearly unchecked piracy (meaning no one really fights piracy on the PC like they do on the consoles). The success with steam though is tied to great pricing, ease of access and being all digital. The model will never really work for consoles/portables because the manufactures need their retail partners to sell and distribute hardware and so they can never fully cut them out of the software loop as that is where all the profit is made by all parties. This prevents digital content from really being priced as it should on the consoles.
I also fully agree with you on the Wii....motion controllers were interesting but other than a few casual entertaining games, I wasn't that compelled. What I liked was that by the end it had more control options like turning the thing sideways for platformers was brilliant and it was well implemented for racing games in Mario Kart and Excite Truck. Mostly I ended up liking games that used the pro controller like Last Story, Xenoblade, and 007. I actually think the gamepad is boss and what Nintendo is attempting to do with WiiU should work out....that is support lots of controller input with the gamepad, the pro controller and the wiimotes all seing support in various games. This gives consumers/gamers options that are not widely available or supported on other systems. I actually like/get the idea of using the gamepad as a second screen while using other controllers and for those that want it offTV is incredible. I don't think Nintendo will ever really solve their problems with 3rd parties.....it is too deep and too complex. As you said they haven't shown them enough love since the SNES (and even then they more bullied them then worked with them). But what you can't blame them for is making awesome games that consumers are going to purchase over/before 3rd party. I think the best hope is what they have been doing since gamecube which is coloborations (like f-zero on GC, SSMB and SMTxFW on Wiiu), exclusives (Like Tales of Symphonia or now the Sonic games agreement). They seem to work best with Japanese devs and can occassionaly pull off something special with Capcom, Sega, Namco, or Altus. I do think they should be kissing Ubi's ass as much as possible because that is about the only Western dev that wants to really suport them and I would love to see a Red Steele 3 HD and Zombie U2. In the end I don't think Nintendo really needs to compete agaisnt the Twins and I think they get that. They need WiiU to be known as the system were you can get unique experiences you can't find on any other platform. I think the HD curve really gave them trouble but this is Nintendo and I expect by this time next year WiiU will have a lot of cool exclusives that make it worth owning.
I think your other points on nextgen are about right...after the big flurry at XMAS I think one or both may suffer a little bit. Probably M$ because they have a higher price point, less exlusives, and can't even compete in Japan. Still just about every major multiplatform title for 2014 is coming to both systems, and current gen, and PC so many budget concious gamers will see no reason to upgrade.....plus they are basically going head to head with nearly the same damned hardware so they are going to be canabalizing each other.....meanwhile WiiU will be getting more and more exclusive content and should always maintain a price advantage.
Yes....we should probably go start a thread called Philosophical discussions on the physcological effects of piracy....lol.