"orthopteroid" has pointed out that the default prefix of /usr/local might be bad as it is not in the default search path.
A work arround for this would be to call configure as "./configure --prefix /usr"
As packaged, it is unbuildable on ubuntu 12.04 (requires use of aclocal from autotools) and it also does not install correctly (ld needs help finding installed library in /usr/local/lib). And yet, my test program (example 1 from the libwiimote project page) still produces "wiimote_connect(): devba: No such device" which the old libwiimote library was giving me.