Prior to the announcement of the Wii U I was considering writing a post jabbing at Nintendo for reusing technology and acting like it's totally new (i.e. motion control and the Power Glove, 3D and the Virtual Boy). I was going to speculate about what they might reuse next. There was going to be a joke about ROB.
But now they've made their announcement, and I lost my chance. The idea, though, turned out to be fairly prescient. The big thing about the Wii U is that there's a second screen. And what's more, it's a touch screen! No one, and certainly not Nintendo, has ever released a game system that has had that feature before.
Sure the Wii U can do things the DS can't, even beyond the higher visual quality. I won't even try to deny that. All I'm saying is that it's not totally super new. It's a refinement and expansion of something they've already done before. That is not inherently bad, and isn't really anything different than what the entire video game industry has been doing for 30 some-odd years.
Some developers will probably do some really neat stuff with it. But honestly, I don't expect that to be the norm. Once what novelty there is wears off, it'll just be another console. And that's okay. It's just not revolutionary.
I was going to add a sidenote questioning how expensive additional controllers would have to be, given that the thing has a 6-inch (presumably) HD touchscreen, a camera and a bunch of other crap packed into it. Then I found this awesome tidbit. You can't get a second controller. I assume they'll eventually sell them separately in some capacity if just to replace old/broken/lost ones, but that's beside the point. Whatever new gameplay is offered by the controller cannot be used in multiplayer scenarios. The demos Nintendo's showing have multiplayer stuff happening, but really all they do with the new controller is eliminate screen watching for one person. Exciting.
One last thing: though it looks a bit ungainly, this might actually be the most playable controller Nintendo's designed since the SNES. But that's more commentary on how much I dislike the Wii, GameCube and N64 controllers than praise for the Wii U.