It's also interesting that Nintendo and Apple often innovate with similar technologies. The central innovations of the DS and wii -- touchscreen and motion controls respectively -- would up being tentpoles of the iPhone.

Four years later and Nintendo's been first to mass market with a 3D device and the central innovation for the wii 2/HD appears to be advanced haptics, something we've seen a number of Apple patent applications for. It will be interesting to see if Apple again catches the rest of the phone industry napping with their implementations of these technologies.

Nintendo also makes a profit on every single console sold from the moment that they are released.

I believe that was not true of the Gamecube very early on (it became true later on as hardware production prices fell).