Yes, wetried bringing the Wii U GamePad everywhere, but Nintendo's (admittedly conservative) estimation is pretty spot-on -- the streamed video that the Wii U pushes to its GamePad wouldn't go very far at all without running into hiccups or cutting out altogether.
We have seen precisely that everywhere such extreme equalization policies have been tried, from North Korea to Cuba to the old Soviet Union and China, and even in the early settlements in America.