Historically speaking, Nintendo had not really been a big believer in the early mover advantage.
The Super Nintendo trailed the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive into stores. The Nintendo 64 arrived fashionably late to the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn generation. The GameCube arrived a year after the PlayStation 2 and two years after Sega's Dreamcast. The Wii hit stores alongside the PlayStation 3, but a year after Microsoft's Xbox 360.
Nintendo's track record of releasing systems whenever it was good and ready rather than feeling rushed by the competition felt very in character for a company with a track record of doing its own thing, from sticking with cartridges after others switched to CD-ROMs to adding a second screen to a handheld to reinventing the fundamental user interface with the Wii Remote.