Nintendo promised better online, and they delivered.
With the Wii U, you get a persistent, always connected, online world. What you get is kind of an amalgamation of Near, Home, Steam, Facebook, and Twitter. You can send messages, communicate, video chat, add new people, meet new people, post status updates, post screenshots, play online against each other, all without ever having to leave your game. The Wii U is fully multitaskable, being the first console ever to do so.
The main menu is going to be like PS Home, an always on persistent MMO where you can interact with various Miis. It will be called the Miiverse, and you can access it anytime. Nintendo confirmed it can be accessed from multiple devices, including smartphones, and they confirmed that Nintendo Network is persistent and unified across multiple Nintendo devices, including the 3DS, Wii U, and any future Nintendo hardware.
We’ll bring you more stuff as we get it.