Plenty of people skipped on the Wii U, but demand for Nintendo's content remained high. People wanted to play BotW and Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 despite not wanting to commit to a dead-end console, so Nintendo gave them BotW, Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch, and dropped hints [1][2] that more are forthcoming.
The Switch refines and realizes the vision of the Wii U and allows gamers who love Nintendo's content to experience some of the best chunks of what they missed, with the promise that more exciting content is on the horizon. The Switch largely sold because people still want to believe in Nintendo, and they think they executed successfully this time around.
[1] http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/06/15/e3-2017-bringing-more... [2] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-more-s...
Kind of a weird attitude, since my phone is just as expensive if not more, but it feels unsafe to take the Switch out for my commute.
Anyway this kind of defeats the purpose of having a portable console format for the Switch if it is not used in this way.
You could have said the same thing for the WiiU (while not a fully portable console per se): It had a few excellent games, but nobody wanted it. It's not as simple as that.