It sort of does have a SSD in it, a SSD is nothing but several flash chips together with a controller to form a larger drive, the Wii U has 8 or 32GB of flash depending on the model, so I mean, aside from size it could or could not be as fast as any SSD on the market. Whether the flash Nintendo used is fast or slow I have no idea, but even if Nintendo did use an honest to God SSD there's no guarantee that they'd have used fast flash memory on it. On the otherhand maybe the flash they're using is blazingly fast and just held back by their shitty os, maybe they have super fast flash chips and the controller's slow as shit? Who knows?
Anyways, the speed of the Wii U is really the primary reason I rarely use it with the gamepad's battery life being second. It's not that the Wii U is just slow, it's that it attempts to gun for a pick it up and play fast gamer with the exact opposite specifications that user needs. A casual gamer like that would find a higher capacity battery life important because they may go extended periods without playing it, they may play for 5 minutes and set the controller down just to find it dead the next day. Your iPad, Nexus, Kindle isn't going to die like that. Further, it doesn't really facilitate quick gaming sessions when it's that painfully slow to actually use. The Wii U has a great browser actually but I don't want to use it because I can't stand switching between shit on the Wii U so I just grab my phone and use that instead.
It's frustrating because I know the Wii U's not a total weak piece of shit but you sure as hell wouldn't know that from using the Wii U because it sure as hell feels like a weak piece of shit. I haven't owned a device as slow as the Wii U since my Blackberry Pearl days.
It's really weird because, at the moment I'm all digital on the Wii U sans Nintendo World and most of the games I have actually load faster than I can get into my System Menu. That's crazy! So it's surely a software thing but it leaves such a sour taste in my mouth in this day and age.