Never underestimate Nintento. When they showed off the Wii Remote back at the TGS, nobody was stunned. Everyone was puzzled or dissapointed, the talks about who will get the rights to their IP was already going on... which was kinda stupid because Nintendo sits on one of the largest piles of liquid money in the gaming industry... they could sit out a whole console generation and still produce another one... don't count them out so fast.
Nintendo's strategy made sense though. A bunch of people didn't want to hear that the gaming paradigm might be changing, but that's besides the point. Personally, I didn't know if they were going to win or lose with their strategy, but I thought that it made sense.
Right now I'm confused about their decision to abandon the Wiimote though. If they're upset that they didn't get as many 3rd-party titles, IIRC that had more to do with the hardware constraints of the platform (I remember it being described as two GameCubes strapped together).
> they could sit out a whole console generation and still produce
> another one... don't count them out so fast.
Isn't that the story of Sega though? The Saturn was a flop, and then the DreamCast wasn't enough to rescue them from becoming a software-only company.
I believe the idea is that the Wiimote will continue to be used alongside the new controller in e.g. local multiplayer games. At least, that's what they had set up in some of their E3 demos last year.