This is exactly WHY Nintendo is going to OWN this generation in terms of installed base. You see Big N knows how to make MONEY... they have always made money.. while people bashed the Cube, the original Xbox only outsold it by a small percentage, and MS lost money with every sale, while Big N was making money with every cube sold.
Big N realised properly, that fighting for the fastest hardware was a fools errand. They let MS and Sony fight that stupid battle, while they have sat back and made fortunes by trying to broaden the appeal of games. Why limit yourself to the "hard core" gamer? Sell a hell of a lot more stuff (and when you are making a profit on the SYSTEM, as Big N is doing with the WII at a $250 price tag) when you have a much broader market appeal and you don't need to sell a gagillion games to make up your losses.
Wii is also showing a lot of folks who wrote off the Cube that there were some seriously enjoyable games for that purple machine that they missed if they didn't own one. Thanks to being fully compatible. Lots of folks with Wii's are picking up used Cube ware for a few bucks and finding out, that "failure" of a system, had some very noteworthy fair.
Like star wars, Rogues Squadron II will hold up against anything you can find, and that was a Cube launch title, 6+ years old and still stands up strong... Metroid Prime unquestionably a must have if you enjoy FPS.... PIKMIN/PIKMIN2 unique, enjoyable and only Cube game... Resident Evil 4.. I don't care if you played the PS2 port, you definately owe it to yourself to play the Cube version and see what you missed. etc etc etc.
Sony and MS and many other gamer press grossly misread the market, and still to this day underestimate Nintendo... with stupid comments like "the wii is an impulse buy." Oh really? How is something that is SOLD OUT as soon as the shipment comes in an "impulse buy"? I didn't stand in line before the store opened with 50 other folks over 3 months after the launch of the system to get one of the few that were shipped on an "impulse". "It's nothing more than 2 gamecube's duct taped together"... Yes the Wii is not going to touch the other systems in terms of pure hardware power, but the Cube was not nearly as weak of a system as some of these folks believe, and as anyone who's owned a Cube and a Wii can tell you, the Wii is far more than 2 cubes mushed together... its far far more than the sum of its parts.
Serious hard core gamers will own all 3, because that's what they do. Moderate core will probably own 2 systems, Wii and an X or a PS3... but many many many more folks will own just a Wii than either of those 2 other sets combined.
Big N definately has fixed the issues they had with Cube, 3rd party support is solid as hell and growing all the time with the Wii... Big N learned from its missteps of the Cube, and has thrown down a gauntlet so large that it won't be seriously challenged until the next generation consoles begin to appear.
Well, I think the 360 is a fine machine for what it does. For me it is a nice, simple plug-n-play console that gives me PC-style gaming without the hassles of the PC. I've been playing a lot of Project Gotham Racing III, which it came with, and is very good. Just picked up Call of Duty 3, which looks and plays very nice. Yeah, I could play these sorts of games on my PC, but I'd have to ensure my hardware is up to date, find some way to get the picture to the big screen, and probably still wouldn't have the nice wireless controller.
Having said all that, once the supply stabilizes, I could definitely see picking up a Wii - it's a very cool concept, and Nintendo always did understand the concept of fun gaming better than most. And that's what gaming's all about, right, having fun? And it's true, chasing after the fastest hardware on consoles is a fool's errand, anyway - the hardware they can afford to put in any of them pales next to the best PC-based hardware.