There is no direct parallel but it is close enough to say yeah they have been gearing up for this for a while. Also the market overall has changed dramatically since those days, computers weren't even viable alternatives to console gaming back then, and outside of Game Boy and Game Gear devices you had Tiger handhelds, there were not real competition to the dedicated handhelds and they did actually intend Virtual Boy to be the successor to Game Boy but it failed to catch on so they when back to the drawing board and basically turned it into a Game Gear and called it a day.
Getting back to Game Boy Color, I could be remembering wrong its been a while but didn't they launch it with Zelda DX and Mario DX, basically just colorized editions of games already available on the previous system? I think Zelda is was the handheld version, maybe Link's Awakening, but Mario was just plain old Super Mario Bros, same old NES game they keep re-selling over and over. I don't think Micro had any big re-issues with it but Micro was a mistake from day one, it was just a move to appease share holders incase DS flopped, they learned their lesson about needing a plan b with Virtual Boy being a dud that came close to taking them down, their original strategy back then was to have Ultra 64 also have a similar VR unit too, Sega and Atari were doing the same things then when VB crashed and burned, Sega and Atari fell into a black hole, Nintendo snapped out of their illusion and went with Plan B, which worked out okay for them.
Dropping Wii U and going portable only *IS* plan B for them, its been discussed countless times by everyone, aside from going 3rd party its the most talked about strategy for their future, I think if this holiday fails to meet expectations they might have to implement a plan b to stay in business, unlike Sony who can afford to loose money because they have other divisions to sell off, for now anyways, Nintendo can't they lost money 2 years in a row they are desperate not to have a repeat so they will do anything to prevent that from happening, it was year 4 of Sega bleeding money they went into nightmare panic mode and from there they fizzled out. Atari was different because they had patents to live off for a while and they owned AOL at one time.