Why would lower hardware sales of PS4 and XOne (which is already a bit of a misled assumption) lead to "vastly superior" WiiU numbers? Nintendo is bound to have a better holiday in relativity to their performance throughout a major chunk of this year, but they've barely crossed the 4 million mark in hardware in the entire year they've had to themselves. I don't see how this is a figure that will be so damning to the prospects of Microsoft and Sony's third party support. The majority of their third party support appears to the be cross-gen, so even if their next-gen versions aren't blowout successes, publishers seem to have enough of a buffer zone to hold them over until this transition period is over.
With that said, I don't see how Watch_Dogs, Assassin's Creed 4, CoD: Ghosts, and Battlefield 4, all coming on ATLEAST 5 platforms each, will fail to return their publishers' investments.
The WiiU is bound to get a bump from Mario, Donkey Kong, and next year's Mario Kart 8 (and maybe one less exclusively due to Wind Waker since that's also coinciding with the price drop). But it comes off like you're suggesting that all the publishers that have more or less rejected or feinly acknowledge the WiiU are somehow going to be desperately wishing they hadn't done so, despite third-party games doing abysmally on the system. If anything, the majority of third parties' plans for releases on WiiU next year have more-than-likely been canned entirely.
In regards to ZombiU, I don't know why you feel the tablet is so necessary to that experience for a sequel. It kinda isn't. Last of Us more or less does a similar thing with its inventory by simply having it appear translucent over the on-screen action. All a game more or less has to do to replicate that experience is not pause the action when going into your inventory or when entering keycodes etc.
