NFC is the new thing. Pointing your phone or tablet at QR Codes to buy tickets and receive stuff? That's for squares Daddy-o. Now it's all about waving them in the air like you just don't care. Activision realized that early on and made quite the package with Skylanders; so nobody should have been too surprised when Nintendo announced they would be implementing the technology in their shiny new Wii U tablet controllers as well.

Well...the Wii U is here, but NFC support is not. Why? Because according to Satoru Iwata, Nintendo is not quite ready to utilize it yet:

We might not have too wait too long though, as Nintendo intends to show off the NFC functionality "in some form" within the year. The most common uses for NFC when it comes to gaming right now are paying for micro-transactions (at least in Japan), transferring save games and wasting money on plastic crap à la Skylanders. But if Nintendo is taking so much time with the technology, they might actually be trying to come up with some new, innovative uses. At least we know that they've got the motivation to do so:

Then again, they could just end up doing Skylanders Pokemon.