No - I don't get why so many people just outwardly hate it. I don't dislike the other two consoles, and if you aren't a dedicated PC gamer - completely get why someone would purchase one. If you're really into baseball games, the PS4 is a must own for The Show (likewise for other exclusives you named). It's not that the other two consoles lack exclusives, it's that the Wii U has significantly more and has a very different play style to what you will find for PC - or the other two consoles.
See, I think you're just assuming two possible extremes of pro- and anti- Wii U sentiment. I have one. I like enough games on it. That doesn't mean I can't rail on it for things like horrible networked gaming and a dearth of titles, when put against the competition. That railing also doesn't make me like playing
Smash and
Woolly World and
Kart with my family and friends less, nor does it un-hype me for the potential of
Pokken Tournament (though hearing the arcade version in Japan has only 10 character hurts me greatly).
I'll also disagree heavily with two things here:
1. I love baseball. It's my favorite sport by 18 million miles over the rest. I'd love to have a game to play on Xbox One that wasn't trash (for the record, I really liked
MLB 2K). HOWEVER, my desire to play a good baseball game again doesn't reach into the realm of spending $350+ on a console just so I can spend another $60 to play one game. There are a couple of other things I MIGHT find to play on PS4, but nothing I want so badly it justifies the console purchase right now.
2. I can't disagree more heavily about the Wii U's "original experiences" and greater exclusive quantity. Well, maybe it has more exclusives, but the library is still rather full of shovelware, and it's highly redundant.
New Super Mario Bros. U,
Super Luigi U,
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze,
Kirby and the Rainbow Curse,
Super Mario Maker, and
Yoshi's Woolly World are all ultimately platformers with twists. Some make the games play quite differently, but the genre is also so basic that there's little of an adjustment period from one of those games to the next. You can lump
Super Mario 3D World into that group as well, really. So, it ends up being that the Wii U grabs my attention for, like, 4 platformers,
Smash, and
Kart, with
Party a giant disaster and uncertainty of depth/quality with
Tennis right now.
To me, the Wii U as I consume it essentially offers 3 experiences right now--arcade racing, fighting, and platforming. Sure, you might want
Wonderful 101 or
Baynoetta 2 or
Hyrule Warriors, and that's fine. However, when I put the 3 basic things that interest me about the console against my Xbox One exclusives, it doesn't compare. My Xbox gives me SUCH different experiences on many levels between FPS (
Halo), racing (
Forza), TPS (
Gears,
Sunset,
Quantum Break), and the variety of titles in
Rare Replay. And while the third-party stuff might not be exclusive, when it's between picking the Wii U and something else, the availability of those multi-platform titles matters, and it makes the competing hard SO much more diverse and deep with games.
That bolded part is wrong to me. A lot of people make that statement and it's utterly dumb IMO. I play games on PC but still find stuff to play on Xb1 and PS4. You've got to be blind not to see all the games that don't come to PC or are just better on consoles. Diablo 3 was infinitely more enjoyable with a controller for example. Not to mention the disasters like Batman Arkham knight. I finished the game on PS4 before they fixed the PC game to something in a playable state.
I agree, and since you mentioned it,
Arkham Knight is going to be re-released on PC on Wednesday, October 28th. You still can't get it on Steam.