I've always thought it looked like a convoluted piece of Satan, right from the beginning. I like that they're trying to go for a more traditional control scheme with the actual buttons and sticks, but... a screen? A mic? Speakers? And who knows what else, plus a tilt/motion sensor on top of all that? Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think the Xbox 360/PS3 gamepads are just about right. I think Nintendo is very rapidly surpassing the point of diminishing returns in terms of how useful that thing's actually gonna be -- unless they keep their flax together it's gonna be the Wii all over again, with loads upon loads of shovelware that's just gimicky and not actually taking advantage of the system's capabilities. Don't forget too, it'll probably be expensive as flax if you want to buy extras for multiplayer games -- I can't imagine anything with that much crap attached to it being anywhere near as affordable as a typical gamepad. Not to mention the battery life! All that flax needs to be powered by something, so battery life is either gonna be terrible having to support all that at once, or it'll be fantastic, at an increased price. It's very hard to have both in a device like that.
I would much rather see the WiiU use a traditional gamepad and support Wii controllers instead of this insanity. That way developers would have to focus on making GAMES and not using the shiny new controller and all its shiny features. That's what was wrong with the Wii -- too much focus on the controller, not enough on the games. Helloooooooo shovelware.