After a vile-tempered traipse across Tokyo, I finally laid hands on a Wii Fit balance board and they slid it over the counter in a thick brown-paper bag. It was horrible: the must-have toy of the season bundled discreetly like porn or hard liquor. “It’s so people in the street don’t see you managed to get the last one,” muttered the sales girl, darkly.

Something else was wrong: I wasn’t overjoyed, just relieved that the retail ordeal was over and oddly furious that, in this day and age, it had taken so much trouble to get what I wanted. “Why can’t those clowns at Nintendo make an extra million more units?” fumed my shopping wing man, as if these machines could fly off a conveyor belt like tins of soup.

A million units? Can we really be spoilt this rotten? Has mass production truly lost its capacity to amaze? It is, after all, easy to overlook the wonders of capitalism at this time of year, when we feel like its servants. The true Miracle of Christmas is not that you or I have beaten the crowds and triumphantly snapped up the last unit in the production run, but that a single one of these units exists at all.

If the Nintendo shortage has reached the point of brown-paper-bag caution in Tokyo, then “console rage” has produced its own madness elsewhere in the world. To help us to feel more like victims, there is a twisted little conspiracy theory – nonsense about a secret warehouse where Nintendo hoards Wiis in an effort to build false “rarity” value for its much coveted toys. To help us to feel vengeful, analysts have calculated that the Japanese company may have lost more than $1 billion this Christmas by failing to meet the demand. Good, we think. Serves it right.

In a way, global markets function too well: we have grown disgustingly complacent about them, and far too quick to condemn their occasional blips. We splutter with rage because we have been temporarily denied the ability to pay what is in reality an absurdly low price for technologies of inconceivable complexity, whose background production stories involve the most intricate commercial networks ever devised.

Every day, abused marvels of engineering to rival the Hoover Dam or Apollo rockets sit in our pockets being bashed about by loose change, or under the telly being slobbered over by the dog. We curse them when they break, we vilify their makers when we can’t get enough, and Christmas lets us do this with an ugly seasonal righteousness.

It is time to change all that. Let this time of year become a proper global celebration of technology and capitalism that have given us affordable flat-screen televisions and super-high-definition movies for the price of a round of drinks.

The chief problem with the miracle of Nintendo’s Wii and the DS handheld game console is that we have a dangerously rich vocabulary of words with which to overlook their glory. We lightly talk of “globalised markets” and of “supply-chain management” as if these satisfactorily explains the mass production of a microscopic capacitor. These are weasel words because they allow us an important sense of amazement at humanity’s ingenuity: looking at the Wii or the DS and blandly ascribing their existence to “commoditised components” is like gazing at the Grand Canyon, shrugging blankly, and saying “geology”.

Crack open the back of a Nintendo DS, for example, and you stare upon the towering genius of engineers and the organisational brilliance of free markets at their best. It is the closest an atheist technophile can come to a religious experience. For if Christmas is genuinely supposed to be about seeing Homo sapiens at the very top of his game, you don’t need the saccharine slogans of “peace on Earth” and “goodwill to all men”, you need a Phillips screwdriver and a corporate handbook of East Asia.

Inside the DS (and this goes for the Wii, the iPhone, the iPod, a Sony Cybershot digital camera and scores more high-tech “must-haves”) are tales of human genius, 21st-century technology and market mechanics that stretch credulity farther than the wildest biblical narratives.

There are components made by corporations such as Murata and Cyntec, whose names are known only within the electronics industry. There are companies, mostly Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese, that undertake tasks we can barely imagine such as producing the microscopic film of protective glass that surrounds a miniature hard disk.

Take the touch-sensitive, full-colour liquid crystal screens of the DS. They are made by Sharp in a factory in western Japan where self-guided robots (themselves collections of thousands of diversely produced components) handle vast plates of glass coated with special chemicals that have travelled from an oil well in the Middle East to a refinery in Japan before reaching the lab in Shikoku from which they are sent to Sharp’s top-secret assembly plant. Layer upon layer of intricate technology is added: spacers made by Nippon Shokubai and colour filters by Toppan Printing. The LCD production process depends on a state-of-the-art filtration machine produced by Kurita Water, costing millions of pounds and ensuring that the screens are rinsed clean between each stage of the process. And it’s all undertaken so that when we stab a grimy thumb at the screen of the DS, the digital image of Mario does something entertaining.

The compact collection of parts in a Wii, an iPod or a PlayStation 3 implies astonishing journeys of thousands of miles over sea, land and air for minute components that lurch from one side of Asia to another before the assembled part is tapped into place in yet another factory. It implies prophetic, make-or-break logistical and investment decisions by dozens of companies employing thousands of people and committing billions of pounds – “Should we commission the construction of a container ship for 2012?”; “Will global silicon demand still outpace supply by the time our plant comes on-stream?”

Above all, the guts of a gadget are the result of peaceful, productive and profitable human interaction – millions of accumulated hours of planning, discussion, trade negotiation, deal brokering and price setting. Even confronted with the blistering frustration of a sign saying “Sold out”, there could scarcely be a better time to celebrate these invisible victories of civilisation over dysfunction.

Leo Lewis is Asia business correspondent of The Times

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