Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said during a dreary financial briefing that the Wii U will not launch until its next fiscal year beginning April, 2012 and that the successor to the Wii would be shown off in final form at next year's E3 show. Given that E3 2012 takes place in early June, we won't likely see the device on sale for at least another eight months, which gives Nintendo a year between E3 showings to work on perfecting the console.

"As we learned a bitter lesson with the launch of the Nintendo 3DS," said Iwata, "we are trying to take every possible measure so that the Wii U will have a successful launch." The console already looks pretty impressive from what we saw at E3 2011, so with all of this extra time, we'd like to think that next year Nintendo will show us more than a tech demo.