I'm a HUGE Nintendo fan, but they seem to be without direction at the moment. After the massive success of the Wii, they find themselves in the situation where they've exhausted the novelty of their innovations. While millions bought a Wii, it flopped with core gamers. Those casual Wii owners see it collecting dust and have no interest in buying a Wii U, if they even know it's more than a tablet controller for their Wii. Nintendo has done a flat out horrible job marketing the Wii U.
I agree it's going to have a short life span due to being underpowered and built on PowerPC architecture that everyone else has left behind and I see third-party support being really poor for the WiiU's lifespan, unless they can turn things around with some killer first-party games. Pikmin, Mario and DK Country are great, but it's not gonna move significant amounts of units until Mario Kart and Smash Bros come out next year. New Zelda and Metroid titles are greatly needed. A brand new core IP is desperately needed to show Nintendo isn't only living in the past. This is also why I think Nintendo needs to use its cash to buy up one or two developers to assure more exclusive first-party games are developed for the WiiU. It sure feels like Western devs have already abandoned it. They can change their mind, but if they start on a project now we won't get to play it until 2-3 years from now.