We're experiencing flat out shameful, incompetent design. Decade-old hardware in a primarily $350 box is not necessary or even particularly beneficial in order to secure an aggressive profit margin, and having power trade-offs with the 360/PS3 architectures ensures bad press and unhappy port-buyers from the beginning, when upgraded current gen ports were very much part of the launch strategy. Fils-Aime has to run laughably dishonest damage control on a daily basis as part of this catastrophic failure to produce a technologically viable system -- again, at such a premium price point.
No worries, though. I'm sure soccer moms worldwide, with their iPads and Nexus 7s sitting on the coffee table, will be enthralled by the unique selling point of a living room tethered, two hour battery life, PDA-era resistive touch screen tablet controller.
Ouch. Harsh.
The next Xbox and PlayStation are not "GPU-centric." There are pretty significant things happening with their processor architectures. And at least for Durango, it's not using off the shelf kit, contrary to what many GAF posters have insisted. Even more troublesome for the Wii U, they have much more dedicated GPGPU capabilities which aren't happening on the dedicated GPUs they're packing.
That doesn't sound like it bodes well for downports. It's interesting the conversation is now framed entirely in relation to the PS360, when the Wii U is theoretically supposed to be in competition with the next generation of Sony and Microsoft systems.
Which is why Nintendo went with what they did in the Wii U.
The Wii explosion of popularity showed them that Average Joe Consumer could care less about graphics/RAM/clock speed.
Average Joe Consumer cares about the end result even if they don't care about the numbers. Hardware improvement and consequently games that don't look possible previously have always been a driver of transition for the traditional console gaming audience.
Nintendo tapped into a market that didn't care about HD at the time with a disruptive technology. They appear to be banking on trying to recapture that expanded audience again with the tablet controller - however thus far they've shown little reason for the traditional audience to adopt unless one is a particular fan of Nintendo titles.
What would you have sacrificed?
Power draw restrictions, form factor restrictions, the need for Wii BC. These seem to be priority culprits alongside price that have resulted in the hardware we're seeing.
And for me personally, the GamePad, which I've yet to see compelling use for.
Prior to the Wii-U's launch and recent hardware discoveries, we had members who took issue with people saying the CPU wasn't based on (or related to in any way) Watson, the console was closer to the PS360 than the 720/PS4, that there was nothing special about the Zelda/Bird tech demos, and so on. The importance of hardware power in the Wii-U continued on when news hit about the first line of ports, with many people falling on the "lazy dev" bullshit excuse or the developers just don't wish to use to learn how to use the system correctly conspiracy theory.
However now, many people are reverting back to the whole power isn't that important, this is good because of dev costs, etc.
Oh good, I'm not losing my mind and memory - as that's been the general feeling I've been getting from these threads. But it's been said that this is what we expected all along now.