Yes, the numbers for the WiiU in January and February were pretty low. But, I think that it does make sense for a new console with practically no games available to sell less than a mature console with a catalogue of hundreds of games. As I said in my previous comment, I think it is still too early to know if the WiiU will be successful or not.
Also, it seems like the numbers you mention are for North America only, were the XBox 360 has been most successful. If you look at the global numbers, the WiiU still sold less than the XBox 360 but no so bad as it looks when looking only at North America:
The Xbox 360 has games people want to play. The Wii U is currently lacking in that department.
Every major game console for ~10 years has had this issue, and they never seem to learn, and it is actually really relatable in the HN tetchy startup side of things : if you don't have a killer app, you won't drive adoption. Like how Halo is the Xbox killer app, Mario is the Wii killer app, etc. Same with the 3ds and Pokemon. If you want a new console launch to look spectacular, launch it with a platform exclusive of your killer franchise. If the Wii U, for example, launched with the next Zelda game on release, it would have probably crushed Wii sales.
>Nintendo's console sold just 57,000 units in January, managing to up that number to 64,000 in February.
By comparison, the 7.5 year old XBox 360 sold 302,000 and 281,000 in Jan and Feb respectively.