Gamecube was a success. It wasn't a wild success. It also was the hardware foundation for the Wii (seriously, the wii is a gamecube and an arm chip smashed together).

Wii U was probably profitable. Not a success like a company like Nintendo needs, a strategic misstep that didn't impact their fortunes significantly. Hardware-wise it was a very direct descendant of the Wii (and gamecube). Relatively low development cost. The games developed for it are being ported to the switch to great success.

Just a quick correction, the Wii was still PowerPC based like the GameCube. It just took both the GPU and CPU and upped their power a bit, but was not different from the GameCube in any real significant way.

The Wii did have a few distinctions from the GameCube. However they abstracted them in an interesting way

The Wii itself was still a G3 PPC chip, just add a few hundred Mhz

It also had more RAM (which allowed the "Twiizers" attack over a decade ago)

All the Wii-centric functionality (USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, SD card, etc) was abstracted away inside an ARM co-processor inside the GPU. Named "Starlet" by the homebrew community

Wii software was then written that would simply poke at the API's it exposed to add that functionality

Ah, yeah totally forgot about starlet. It's been a while since I messed around in the Wii homebrew scene, but that was basically got me interested in cybersecurity in the first place when I was in middle school. I should go back and look at it now that I actually know what I'm doing (more or less).

Pokemon is the most compelling property that Nintendo owns. It's a little baffling that they haven't embraced it as a console rpg

That comment reminded me of a failed Pokemon RPG and inspired me to find this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Qx0eP8uVo. Thanks!

Nintendo follows a similar pattern to Microsoft where they alternate between failures and wins. Also, Nintendo doesn't own Pokémon.

Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures Inc. are coowners of The Pokemon Company, but Nintendo is the sole owner of every related trademark.

It might be possible for Creatures Inc and Game Freak to have The Pokemon Company create a Pokemon game for PlayStation (it's not known how ownership/control is divided), but it couldn't use the name Pokemon, the Pokemon logo, or any of the existing Pokemon characters.

And regardless of who owns Pokemon, Nintendo is the one selling Game Boys and DSes to play it on.

They do own a piece of the company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pokémon_Company

It's a complicated arrangement, but they're definitely banking off the success of the franchise directly and indirectly.