As the largest Japanese company, it boggles my mind to hear concerns over Nintendo's strategy.
I swear, if the vocal minority had their way, they'd want Nintendo to go third party and develop for NextBox. Why? So they don't have to buy Nintendo systems to play Nintendo games.
And these are supposedly long time fans of Nintendo.
While I don't exactly wish that Nintendo would go third party (did not work out well for Sega, quality-wise), at this point in time I don't really see the point in differentiated platforms. All the next consoles will be dressed up PCs with extremely similar basic controller inputs (360 controller base) with fairly similar accessories (Wiimotes, PS Move, Smart Glass, UMote). I think people generally agree that there should be a standard of online functionality similar to that of the 360, with the multi-media apps that will be on all three consoles. What's really being gained by having three difference consoles? It's a very narrow competitive track for exclusive games. Sony has a lot, most are marginal, Microsoft has a few, which are huge, Nintendo has a moderate amount of active properties that are pretty big.
I think this parallels the sort of crisis that's happening with handhelds and to take a longer view, general computing. Really it would be best for the consumer if a single platform offered the content of all companies, both media and game, but then you encounter monopoly problems. The more I think about, the hypothetical Steambox licensing approach with minimum specs might be the best outcome.
Look at the desktop computing war: Apple has pretty much ceded that ground to Microsoft, outside of the realm of high-end media production, and the world seems to have shrugged past on the vague hope that Windows will suck less in the future than it does today (which has mostly proved true so far).