I don't think it's anywhere near the best, in fact some people will claim it was the worst, though that's a huge lack of perspective.
It was a great console because it had great games, games that really meant something to the people who played them. Mario 64 was the first 3D (not sprite-based) game of any kind that didn't suck, Goldeneye invented and perfected the template for what we consider the modern shooter, Rogue Squadron and Mario Kart (and Golf) and Conker's Bad Fur Day and Turok 2 and Perfect Dark were all awesome. Others, like Star Fox and Zelda 64 are on a lot of people's best-game-ever list, though I was left a little wanting by them.
Also, I'll still hold that, from a non-business, strictly gamer perspective, Nintendo did good in staying with the carts. Those things loaded instantly, and N64 was (games aside) a much better system to play than the PS1, hands down. People who say otherwise have completely forgotten just how insanely long first generation PS loading times were. From a business standpoint it was stupid of Big N, nobody wanted to develop for them, but from a gamer's perspective it was much more pleasurable to play the good games that did come out for it.
The bad, of course:
RPG fans were completely left out. I mean, so completely left out that me and my friends tried to theorize for years about what technical bug there was that prevented a single RPG from coming out on the system, like, ever. The closest they ever came was the godawful Quest 64. I know the whole backstory with Square and Sony and CDRoms and so forth, but God DAMN, not one RPG for the company that had virtually all the RPGs in the SNES generation.
The RPG thing was just a symptom of the system's real problem, of course, the carts. The reason there was such a high hit-percentage on the N64 was that you'd have to be crazy to develop for it if you knew you weren't going to make a hit, since the materials cost 20-25 $ vs. < $1 for the PS.
And of course, I'll always be a bit bitter about the N64 because that was when Nintendo began its slide into kid-focus in earnest. And then there were little things like the draw distance and the expansion RAM and the space on the carts, but those are the same sorts of things fanboys argue about today. (Zomg Blu-Ray! Live ftw! MotionPlus splits the userbase!)
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