Do people genuinely believe this?
a) Nintendo can do marketing (if nothing else they did it earlier with the Wii -- they shoved it in front of all the dribblers watching daytime TV, held contests, shoved it everywhere) and had the money to do so.
If there had somehow been some kind of widespread "oh it is just another wii fit type thing" (there might have been some but presumably mostly from the people that still call every console a sega) then they could have corrected for that.
b) The Wii U architecture was absolutely atrocious. The powerpc in the gamecube was not the worst thing in the world but whatever, overclocked for the Wii it was rather long in the tooth and then stapling three of them together and not paying any attention to the lessons the last however long of multicore processor design taught us made it a bad plan, and that was before being massively outclassed by the competition and also losing support of key engine developers (if they had waved a fat stack of the then not the most financially stable unreal peeps they would have had something, one also wonders if we would have had fortnite in such a world). Storage was also potentially a problem but easy enough to dodge if they had to.
By various accounts the dev kit setup was also nothing to write home about, or if it was then it was because it was not good.
c) The Wii U online was a joke and a rather bad one at this point. Now I might not care about online but it was the direction the industry was going and a half arsed effort might well have been worse than none.
