There's no doubt that Nintendo have made a few mistakes with the Wii U. For a start, they needed a better selection of games available at launch. The top tier games (such as Pikmin 3 which is brilliant) have only recently started to appear. Whilst I understand that Nintendo would want to launch a range of games over several years, there has been too long a wait to get to games such as Mario Kart and a new Super Mario game.
However, Nintendo have shown with the Wii U that they are still prepared to take risks when it comes to their offerings and try to develop new ways to play games. I can't yet be sure that the Wii U controller is the best way to play a game because I don't think there have been games out yet that really exploit it but at least they're trying.
Sony and MS however could not have come out with more vanilla consoles. Both are basically glorified PCs. Whilst I'm sure there is some business logic behind this, I would like to know where the next generation of cell processor is? Where are the new and clever control mechanisms? Sony would seem to be churning out a slightly modified dual shock (presumably so you can't use your old ones) and MS are basically using Kenect again. So, PCs and the same controllers that were used before.
For me, I've yet to see anything from Sony that will let them loose my credit card details again. From MS, I get the impression they're not interested in attracting new gamers, they want new customers to use all the non-gaming services as all the existing customers are assumed will want to convert.