If Nintendo learned there lesson they wouldn't have just decided to make a system on par with ps3 and xbox360.
In a year the next systems will be out and once again nintendo will be out of date. I guess WiiU can live off of old ports though during that period of time.
To be fair, we've kind of reached the point where performance and graphics technology give a lot less bag for their buck; that is, the cost of increased performance is proportionally increasing and thus less efficient.
Based on the information that has been floating around, the Wii U is supposed to be 25%-50% more powerful than PS3. Given that, and the fact that the PS3 is, according to Sony, supposed to get at least 4 more years out of it, I don't think we're going to be seeing any sort of generational gap like we did with the Wii. If anything, it's putting Nintendo on a completely different release timeline, which, if the new 3rd party relationships do work, could seriously end up hurting future console sales for their competitors.