Really, apart from in the very beginning with NES, buying a Nintendo machine was always mostly for the exclusives. To varying degrees it changed over time; when the Mega Drive took a lot of the market share, there were plenty of 3rd party exclusives to be had there. N64 if not for Rare, which was basically Nintendo back then anyway, would have been entirely supported by Nintendo 1st party. Gamecube had a few notable 3rd party exclusives but by comparison, PS2 and even Xbox had way more. The Wii for a time was getting a lot of support more like NES/SNES era, but given the gulf in hardware specs, there were massive amounts of 3rd party exclusive stuff on PS3 & 360. A lot of Wii's support was also shovelware like PS2, because it had the biggest install base.

Even though Wii U is looking like a commercial flop, i think it's highly unlikely they'll discontinue it (ie, do a Sega). Nintendo know dropping support will reduce consumer confidence in whatever comes next as well.

Though it's true their options are looking limited, i'd say it's most likely they'll just keep on hammering out the exceptional 1st party games they always do, hope the install base grows such that they can get some decent 3rd party stuff... and just ride the Wii U out until the market will accept a new console, and try again. They've proven over and over that their software alone can at least sustain a console. Either way, buying now isn't that bad an idea since typically a console's best years are around end of year 2 into year 3, when development is starting to get into gear.

Personally, i don't consider consoles based on their price at launch or afterwards... if someone were concerned about price then they ought to be thinking long term, like how much am i going to spend total on hardware & games, over the course of this system's life. In that respect, you'd almost want less good games to come out!

The problem of buying multiple consoles and opening doors to all the exclusives is obviously that you have too much choice! I'm doing a balancing act right now with 3DS, Vita & Wii U stuff. Some would argue both Vita and Wii U don't have many games period, but couple them with 3DS, and i am flooded with so many high quality games i can't even get around to playing half of them, and i'm spending a bloody fortune!