That "strategy" worked before so why not again?
Not really, no. The DS launched in November 2004 at a price of $149.99 I believe. That's a full $100 less than the 3DS launched at, and yet even at that price the DS had sluggish sales for the first 8 months or so. The DS and its revisions were never priced any higher than $169.99 I think... maybe the XL model or something was $189.99, I don't really remember. But none of them was over $200 and certainly not $250, so I don't know why Nintendo would think the 3DS would sell at that high of a price. That was new and unprecedented.
Nintendo got greedy with the 3DS and they've paid the price for it, but this "strategy" did not work before. This was the sort of arrogance Sony made with the PS3 by pricing it at $600 though not near as bad, obviously. Unlike the PS3 Nintendo corrected the 3DS price quickly and before the competition showed up, so I think the 3DS has already recovered and there should be no long term problems. Hopefully they've learned their lesson, but I hope they don't interpret this as a reason to cheap down the Wii U and its components at the cost of making it a system that is too weak and 3rd parties want nothing to do with.
Console and handhelds are two different things. Pricing a handheld above $200 is a no no, obviously, but its accepted as normal for consoles. So you can price a console at $249.99 or $299.99 or maybe even a bit higher than that and get away with it, but you can't get away with doing that with a handheld. People are willing to spend more on consoles because they expect more out of them. Consoles are supposed to be powerful graphical processing beasts. I think this is something that's going to hurt the Vita, because it is built powerful, yet its a handheld.