Single? Yes. Dude? Yes. But I definitely wouldn't say that I am rich. If I were rich, there wouldn't be any reason for me to frequent these boards. But I do take your point. When you are single and have relatively stable income, you have a lot more options when it comes to spending on entertainment. I may not be burning Benjamins, but I'm not going hungry either.
The system models I mentioned earlier were all purchased used, several years after any of those systems came out. In most cases they were acquired long after the successor system had already been on the market for a while. I am a Cheap Ass Gamer, after all. It's still true that video game systems get minor hardware revisions on a regular basis to cut back on production expenses.
While I don't agree that the removal of backwards compatibility will happen, I do acknowledge the possibility. It is less likely for this feature to be stripped out than it was for the original Wii. And even there it took Nintendo several years before they removed it. By the time they did, the Wii was already in decline.
The Wii U does not actually include identical hardware to the Wii. Nor did the Wii contain a complete GameCube inside it. They simply all had processors of the same basic design and from the same manufacturer. They were advancements on the same concept, but the basic architecture never changed. Because of this, Nintendo was able to run the same software with very little trouble. Some degree of engineering had to go into the design in order to allow the backwards compatibility, but there was no need for them to reinvent the wheel. With the Wii, they didn't remove the backwards compatibility in order to remove something from inside the machine, but rather something outside of it. The controller ports and memory card slots on the side of the Wii were an unnecessary production expense. By stopping backwards compatibility support for the Wii, Nintendo could start producing Wii systems without those ports. This allowed them to simplify the motherboard as well as the external case, cutting back on both production and assembly.
The Wii U has almost nothing that needs to be removed. It already supports the Wii controller as one of its default inputs. The Wii U and Wii have identically sized discs, so there is no need for a custom disc loader. The only real benefit from removing Wii compatibility from the Wii U would be to remove the SD card slot on the front.