The Wii only achieved an odd form of success though. While lots of people bought it and Nintendo profited on the sales of the consoles, nowadays they're just sitting on people's shelves unused. Even with that kind of market saturation is it successful if the average Wii owner has, what, less than 5 games? Less than 2? I don't know the answer but if something is purchased but then rarely used it's only a partial success. They have to sell games too.
Actually, unlike Microsoft and Sony, all Nintendo has to do is sell the system and they've already made a profit, even on launch day.
As far as selling games goes, well let's take a look at the top selling games across all consoles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#All_Consoles
If we disregard Wii Sports (since it was included for free) and all previous generation consoles, then we have the following:
Mario Kart Wii
Wii Sports Resort (some of these were included, but some were purchases separately
Wii Play
New Super Mario Bros Wii
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Wii Fit
Wii Fit Plus
GTA V
That's 5 or 6 top sellers for the Wii (depending on if you count Resort), and only 2 for the competition. Looks like they aren't hurting too bad. But what about just the overall total of all games sold for the console, worldwide?
http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Software/Global/
Wii: 901 million games
360: 826 million games
PS3: 749 million games
Yep, that is indeed an odd form of success. Most hardware sold (with none of it sold at a loss), and most games sold. What a total failure.
Oh, and since you said you didn't know the answer about the tie-ratio:
http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Tie-Ratio/Global/
Wii: 8.99
360: 10.48
PS3: 9.35
So yeah, they are on the bottom of that metric, but still very respectable...only 4% lower than the PS3 and 15% lower than the 360. Not bad at all considering all those system supposedly sitting unused on shelves.