They're not going to get 3 years of support though. They're not going to have 3 years of amazing sales. They'll get a launch with a bunch of half assed up ports, and then devs going ohhh well our tech is moving to this and the Wii U 2 doesn't support that. They'll get MAYBE a year of half assed ports and then nothing.
At least coming out at the same time with a machine that is CLOSE (not not fucking half their performance) but CLOSE to their performance means it's at least possible and cheap to do the ports. Which means it's less of a risk for 3rd parties, specially less than supporting some middle generation platform. Just like the fucking Wii U is.
How do you figure it'll be 3 years with out a drought, every console has a drought, coming out mid generation won't stop that.
No consomers aren't going to go ohhh Nintendo offers the best console experience a few years later, they'll go Ohh Nintendo late to the generation again with this mid gen console crap.
Seriously, releasing a console in 2016 is going to piss of folks who bought a Wii U in 2012, and cause even more people to take a wait and see approach. Specially developers.
It's a terrible fucking idea, and it's miss-reading the market completely.
The market doesn't want consoles to stand apart by hardware choices, they want it from 1st party software.
Nintendo's best course of action is to make it so that porting a game to their platform costs pennies, then it becomes a no brainer for 3rd parties. Because if it costs pennies to port, then selling even a small amount becomes profit.
No one, not the consumer market, not developers, NO ONE is going to jump on a mid gen console. Specially not coming off of the Wii U. You are literally asking them to go down the Sega route.
Match MS and Sony next gen, and show games that all they need to own is a Nintendo console. Show them it can run all the next gen engines, and that 3rd parties have no problems putting their games on there. Show them that along with all the 3rd party titles they want, running just as well as on the competition, they also get the crowning gem of Nintendo 1st party titles.
This is what the market is asking from them, how many people say they won't buy a Nintendo console because the hardware is some mid gen thing. You may not think those people are important, but obviously there's a lot of them in the market considering the PS4 has already outsold the Wii U. Even with the Wii U's SUPERIOR line up.