It's never pleasant to watch a console fail. Each time it happens, the system is often fondly looked upon by hardcore fans who knew it best. The Dreamcast, PlayStation Vita, Wii U... all have great games if you look closely, and had a strong indie showing in their dying years. The Dreamcast in particular still has homebrew developers making games, more than a decade after its demise.
That being said, Nintendo had plenty of games and a fairly interesting concept behind the Wii U: A comfortable, tablet-style controller that could play selected titles away from the TV screen. It was also Nintendo's first ever HD console, and the first to offer onboard storage for games (beyond the 512MB on Wii, meant for Virtual Console).
The story behind the crash of the Wii U is a familiar one for Nintendo fans: not enough third-party support, an online suite of features that didn't match their competitors, and first-party software droughts that lasted months on end.
Yet the Wii U could have been saved, provided it had a few tweaks here and better game support there.