At the conference (I think) they said the Ubisoft games have been in development for two years.Pikmin was a Wii game that was switched over to Wii U. ZombiU is Killer Freaks that switched from an arcade shooter to a survival horror zombie game. Not exactly great examples of long term stable development HD titles.
If Ubisoft took their existing tech and spruced it up a little to take advantage of much more RAM plus better AA. Zombie U would be looking nicer. There's definitely a bottleneck somewhere - it might be there isn't enough raw horsepower.
Nintendo can be excused for not pushing graphics on their casual games. Plus lack of experience with shaders etc.
Haven't people in this thread been saying that the OS eats up like 500MB or something? Wouldn't the controller screen also take up a good chunk?
That's a ridiculous amount of RAM for the OS. It's a game machine first, all other social & browsing stuff is secondary.