Topic: My Wii U just had an update...

Yes, but Wii U launched without it, so they added it in a later update, but it's still easier to use the GamePad.

About the crashes, I only experienced one when playing Sonic & All Stars. I think the crashes are mostly dependent on badly programmed games, I play about 5 hours a day on my Wii U without an issue (mainly switching between Rayman Legends, Earthbound and Miiverse, because I just have to tell the world how amazing they are!) . The OS at launch did have it's share of serious bugs, but that's been fixed. Sure it could still be faster, and that's the direction they're striving for, the quick boot menu will be an handy feature.

Yup. Sega made a patch to fix these issues a while ago.

Disc copies of alot of games are more prone, as well, because some games required data to be on the HDD on Xbox 360. So developers had to find a work around for the Wii U to read all the data from the disc, instead of a disc and HDD partition combo.

The only disc based game that hasn't had a disc data errors is CoD Ghosts, which required 8GB of HDD space on Xbox 360. That's good programming on Activision's part.

Wii U doesn't need HDD space for these games, so now the disc is telling Wii U to read another part of the disc for further data. That causes the disc versions of games to perform poorly, compared to a digital version where data is all in one place.

i can't imagine what this update did because it took about 3 seconds in total.

It's mostly 3rd party games that freeze on the Wii U & physical copies not saying online does not crash aka Youtube & Internet browser & Miiverse have all crashed on me before.

I've had the problem with -

Darksiders 2
Splinter Cell Blacklist
Sonic & All Stars
Call Of Duty Black Ops 2
Batman Arkham City
Assassin's Creed 3
Ninja Gaiden
Monster Hunter

So out of 24 games I own on the Wii U I've had problems with 8 never a Nintendo game yet but I remember on launch loads of people reporting online problems with Mario U & Nintendo Land but them issues have been fixed for the most part.
I feel the Wii U still needs some fixes done & some patches before it will be 100%.
Also remember this problem mostly happened during launch & over the first 6 or so month of the Wii U but the problem / issue is still happening on the Wii U so Nintendo has not fixed it yet.

@turnmebackwards
Well, the internet is clearly an issue with your setup.

Nintendo probably will release a patch for better software stability, but we can't really ignore that such software wasn't really optimized for Wii U, to begin with, for some of it, anyway.

My Wii U froze with Nintendo Land as well. This might sound like I'm making stuff up, but I launched all the system apps at least once, and that fixed the Nintendo Land issue. Apparently, if you didn't launch Miiverse or whatever else, the console had problems connecting with an app you never used before. Aside from that, like I said, the Wii U uses Spotpass to make frequent connections to the internet. If that connection doesn't complete, it will freeze your console.

I've been playing Nintendo consoles online since DS games with Wifi came out. If your router isn't up to date or has a ton of unnecessary settings in place, you won't have a good connection, I literally got to the point where my router was obsolete, once.

EDIT: There are things that need to be fixed, but there are ways to make things work without complaining about Nintendo. I'm not directing this at you, BTW.