Major hardware (even revamps) are known across the board.
Come on, now, Nintendo is bad, but it's not this bad. It's not like Japan cooked this up overnight and just dropped it on the world: marketing and budgets are worked out months in advance before an announcment or even a leak is made.
What you're seeing is the 'new' way of denial, after the Zelda/Revolution cock up (which seems so true it hurts-- NGC Mag has no need to make this up). As earlier mentioned, "no comment" is as good as a confirmation. Denial of personal knowledge/awareness is far better, even if it means being brought to task in future interviews -- but thats what media training is for. It's not like his rep matters to public reading such interviews. His job, however, matters far more...
C.