That is the proper move right now.  If the Wii U was selling Gangbusters and that was the largest complaint then I think it be a good move.  As things are currently not a big enough niche for the R&D.

When Reggie said we would be able to use 2 Gamepads a couple E3's ago I knew it was just a talking point the settle the angry masses.

It was nice to hear it confirmed. That was a major oversight on Nintendo's part.

Asking people to buy an extra GamePad is not realistic as long as Nintendo is charging an arm and a bottle of tears for each one because they're more interested in marking up the price than reaching more people. Splatoon looks like it could actually benefit from two GamePads. It's a shame really. Oh well, there's always Splatoon 2 for the Wii U successor's launch. Make a better GamePad 2, sell it for $50 (regular controllers $30). People want this. Just lower the price of entry.

Probably the cost issue with the Gamepad is that it's arguably over-designed. It's got a camera, and IR sensor, touchscreen, gyros (from what I've read on par with Wiimote+), mic, NFC, rumble, and lord knows what other gimgams buried in it. The NFC might turn out to be a smart move if the Amiibos take off, but that seems pretty damned unlikely. If it was just a controller with a touchscreen, then it could reasonably sell for $60 and be a genuine accessory for multipad games. But that doesn't appear to be in the cards.

Although I wonder if the tech for streaming two pads at the same time just isn't feasible despite internal hopes that they could figure it out. For all the WiiU tech bashing, the gamepad streaming is extremely impressive.

The screen is the most expensive part. The rest of the GamePad uses fairly cheap parts. I've seen bananas with high quality cameras. According to an article I'm too lazy to dig up again, the parts for the GamePad cost about $80 at launch (not counting manufacturing). In 2014, that amount has only gone down so even if Nintendo insisted on making a small profit, they could get the price down to something reasonable.

Streaming to two GamePads apparently cut the framerate in half. It's feasible, but if a game isn't already running at 60 frames per second, it isn't worth it.

I think it was more of a "Wii U will NEVER be selling like shit like it is now that we wouldn't be able to consider that, right?" kind of thing; not a talking point.

I think when they said that they fully intended to do it, but the way the thing's sold since then has rendered it fairly impractical.

$80 is the cost of a Gamepad to actually buy it last I checked.  If we go by that account then Dual Shock 4 and the XBox One Controllers should easily be half the price there charging.

I wonder if they could release one with a 4" or 3.5" screen and save money. Those would still be very usable and might actually increase comfort and look better (sort of a gba micro effect).

The second part is the reason I believe we'll never see it. It seems technically possible, but the tech is limited. Thus, I think there would require a great deal of software optimization to get it to work right with each title. At this point, Nintendo would be loathe to add to the development cycle.

I mean 2 Gamepads seems like a selling point to me and they already manufacture them. Seems like creating an sku is the easy thing. It probably takes more of Miyamotas time to explain why their isn't 2 gamepad connectivity than to get it to retail shelves.

It's not a question of whether it could work, it's whether implementing it would be worth it for what would undoubtedly be a very, very small number of users taking advantage of it. It's like Motion+ on Wii, where not many games used it to any real extent because of the limited user base, despite Wii having sold like 10 times as many units as Wii U has and the dongle being cheap and easy to get.

I guess I think we are saying the same thing. If it was easy to implement then of course it would be worth doing.  Nintendo released the circle pad for 3ds for like 3 games. They released gba to gc cable for like 3 games. They can sell the gamepad at a profit and use dual gamepad as a marketing scheme. The only question is how much effort/cost is it to get software ready to use dual pads. Is it flicking a switch for something like sonic transformed that already had player 2 offscreen so now players 1 + 2 are offscreen?  Or are we talking about $500,000 more in MK 8 development costs?  I think the latter is what stops this from happening and it seems that is what you are saying too.

It is dissapointing to me though because I think dual gamepad would be awesome.

The difference is the GC-GBA cable was like $10, easier to get people to bite for a couple things. And the Circle Pad Pro's a whole different thing entirely; Nintendo would have added a third Circle Pad if they'd had to to get Monster Hunter.

Also need to consider how the Gamepad works.  There is a fix amount of graphic processing the Wii U can do.  Right now it can do the Screen and the Gamepad ok.  Add another Gamepad and you probably knock it to Wii Graphics not to mention the raw wireless bandwidth it has to work with.

They said when they initially talked about it that it would result in half the frame rate on the GamePads, as it would essentially be splitting it across both of them, so it never would have been that great of a solution.