This is kind of a shitty thing to admit, but Ive never actually owned a Nintendo home console until the Wii. Why? For the same reason Ive never owned a 360 - everyone else I know has one. And no, its not elitism, its getting to play the best other systems have to offer for free. I love the first Halo as much as people who actually owned it because I used to go to my friends house and play it almost every day for about 2 months.
I always chose the alternative - Genesis instead of SNES, Playstation instead of Nintendo64, and PS2 instead of Gamecube.
So far i feel ive made the best choices. My real love for Nintendo is in it's handhelds. Ive owned every single iteration of the GB and GBA. I got the DS, then the DSlite, then I stopped. I got older and had my own job and had to pay for my own shit and realized how much of a waste getting these Nintendo handheld "upgrades" was. The 3DS has only sunk them deeper into mediocrity in my eyes. Theres just so many things wrong with that system.
That being said, the Wii is awesome and the games are either amazingly great, mediocre and probably better on another system, or awful. There are no inbetweens in WIi games. And guess what? The Nintendo franchise games are the great ones. Third party developers just leave scraps for Wii owners. We play RE5, Wii owners play those ok Chronicles games, we play Dead Space 1 and 2 and Wii owners play Extraction(Which I actually love, but not as much as DS1 and DS2), and shit like that just keeps going on.
The saddest part is that a lot of good games get brought up to great status by the fanboys because its on the Wii and maybe they dont own a 360 or PS3 and dont know any better. I dont know what their deal is. I guess starvation can make a dirty boot taste like pumpkin pie. I personally hate this because they try to convert people and convince them into buying a system with a listful of great games, when in reality that list could probably be cut in half.
By the way, I actually like the Wiimote. I own Move too. Im actually onboard these "motion gimmicks". So yeah, I dont know what to think of it either. Except that the WiiU isnt being bought anywhere near launch day by me.
Id also like to say that to me they havent really represented gaming as a whole since the SNES. The Playstation 1 was when I truly become a gamer, when I realized that it was one of my passions in life. While people were playing Mario 64 I was playing MGS, something I had truly never seen before in my life or even imagined. Mario in 3D? Not that big of a stretch to me. Though even with Galaxy 1 and 2(which are awesome), i dont think Mario has ever been as great since his 2D platforming days.
Nintendo pushes a lot of neat innovative things and other people copy them, but I doubt theyre the future of this medium.