[bityard]

I always saw it as: Sony and Microsoft seem to aim to be the "premium" gaming/set-top-box experience for pro-sumers and hardcore gamers.

Nintendo, on the other hand, tries to appeal to a much broader market. They learned from their success in the 80s, when pretty much every North American living room with kids in the household had an NES and a stack of games on top of the TV. Nintendo sees themselves as friendlier to casual gamers and families. They want to the "the safe choice" when grandma or grandpa whip out their checkbook at Walmart to buy a gaming system for their grandchildren.

Just being family-friendly doesn't quite guarantee success, which is why they've always been exploring new ways to interact with video games. Basically every new console they've introduced has had controllers markedly different from what came before. (Even if it turns out they were not necessarily _better_ than what came before.) In the case of the Wiimote, they pretty much hit a home run. It was not only a novel input method, it turned out to be loads of fun for casual gaming, social gatherings, and families.