For me, personally, there's one thing that stands out in front of the pack, and it's not just because I totally predicted it almost five full months ago on this very website. Well it kind of is.
Karaoke
That's right, Nintendo has partnered with Xing for Wii Karaoke U, a "business-class" karaoke application for the system. Though I predicted the karaoke software might end up being a trojan horse to get Wii U systems into Japanese homes, it looks like the Wii U itself will be trojan horsing the Wii U, since it's preloaded on every Wii U system in Japan and all you have to do is buy the wireless microphones. Users can buy "tickets" for access period of an hour, a day, a month, or three months. As it turns out, the Wii U Gamepad was indeed a good corollary for the ubiquitous karaoke touchpad controllers that find themselves planted in every Japanese karaoke establishment.
Friend requests and followers in Miiverse
So it looks like you have a 100 friend limit there in the 'verse, and can "follow" 1,000 people aside from that without actually being friends with them. It introduces a neat new concept in making it like a social network though in that you could actually follow Miiverse users without actually being "friends" with them. Could this mean the rise of a new brand of social media personality, the Wii U celebrity? Maybe users who are well known for their graphical comments or posts could gain notoriety, or users who are prodigious or insightful commenters could accrue a following?
It's also about goddamned time that we are presented with a way to actually make friend requests from a Nintendo system without actually having traded friend codes first. Though the verdict seems to be kind of out on whether or not your Nintendo Network ID is a specific number or a user-chosen alphabetic name, it looks like at any rate that you'll at least be able to choose a display name, as seen in the above image (the display name is ウィル, or Will, while the "ID" is willwill, presumably a Nintendo Network ID).
Instant screenshots
When the dude in the video decides to Miiverse his medal after beating that New Super Mario Bros. U challenge, he's offered the choice to attach one of a couple (seemingly identical-looking) screenshots, displaying what was on the screen when he hit the home button and started up Miiverse.
Could the Wii U be the first video game console to support universal, direct-feed, native screenshot capture and sharing? I am down with this!
The influence of the 3DS
It's no coincidence that the basic menu interface—which we've been waiting a while to actually get a glimpse of—resembles the 3DS interface more than just a little bit. On the front menu there we can see the disc icon, Mii Plaza, system settings, Wii U Chat, the button that is ostensibly the loader for legacy Wii mode, Activity Log, parental controls, and the health and safety warning. It looks like the indicator on the top denotes a few separate pages that we'll be able to scroll through, and the presence of the little Iwata icon in the upper corner probably means we can tap there to log our Wii user IDs in and out.
Down along the bottom of course are our "default" system applications: Miiverse, the eShop, Internet Browser, Nintendo TVii, and notifications. Though the 3DS interface was itself a kind of evolution of the Wii interface, it's sorta nice and geeky to see that for the first time we'll have the two concurrent new Nintendo systems both basically symbiotically operating on similar design structures and philosophies: square icons in grids, system applications accessible from a fixed bar, and a pervasive home button that allows menu dallying without closing a game.
Reggie's Japanese is atrocious
Reggie: HELLO NEE HON NO MINNIE SAN. KA NITCHY WAH
Iwata: Yes, Ok Reggie
Though there are still questions that ultimately remain, like what exactly is the deal with "accomplishments," the legacy Wii mode and its operation, and the look of things like the eShop and Activity Log, lots of questions were answered with today's Nintendo Direct. If things didn't seem that surprising maybe it's a good thing. It looks like Nintendo is finally giving us pretty much what we've always asked for and then some with regards to networking. I'm glad to see that it seems to be on Nintendo's own terms, instead of just checking off a list of boxes.