there are worse things than not being able to massively grow a userbase, and even a cut of $50 on every system sold would be pretty not great - at least $100m in lost revenue at their current projections. the wii u project probably will never turn a profit, but they can try and minimize the loss it will take as much as they can. a mini gamepad that can be sold separately, made of cheaper and fewer materials could do well to lessen the price of the console and device, depending on cost of goods and how it could be marketed.
looking at the schedule for upcoming games, i think the wii u and 3ds are basically done. on the 3ds side they're in remake mode, aside from codename steam. if a new handheld is two years away, i wouldn't have any problems believing that seeing how the release schedule for the 3ds has dried up.
on the wii u side, 2015 looks to be the year with the most steady stream of releases. however, zelda, yoshi, and xenoblade have been in development for years. mario party 10 and mario maker require few development resources. even splatoon was supposedly made by a small team, and i wonder if it would have even come out unless nintendo was so desperate for a release schedule - it's the sort of thing that makes me think mario maker and the miyamoto projects were games pulled from the trash like steel diver. just something to slot in a release schedule. the only games announced last year that might go against that line of thought are star fox and kirby. it's hard to know when those games were started and how big of a budget they received.
if nintendo will be making a sort of double-platform, where same games or a lot of the same games can be shared across libraries, i think ead tokyo, retro, and ead 4 (the pikmin/nsmb team that's currently doing mario maker) would be the likeliest first-party candidates to have launch titles ready. ead 5 would probably be put on qol stuff seeing as they're the wii fit people.
