not compared to PCs, it's not.

oh man this thing is gonna flop so bad.

well, nintendo always overprice their consoles , thats why it cant be very powerful

Because those many years will change to a few years when the Wii U is released and on the same note you could also find people in 2009 who were tired of these HD generation and want to move on...

Anyway those Tech demo's don't really proof that Wii U is way more powerfull, Nintendo knows how to max an console for an example look to Super Mario Galaxy (1 and 2) how many Wii games are their that look better while SMG is now (almost) 4 years old? Let Miyamoto work on a Mario game on PS3 and he probably would create one if not the best graphics game we saw this HD generation..

Two questions I have seen several times that I thought I could answer ...

Why doesn't Nintendo release the specifications?

While Nintendo does manufacture hardware they do not consider themselves to be a hardware company. They're a game developer and they only care about hardware to the extent that it is needed to create the games they desire. With this in mind, they want everyone to focus on the software that is being produced not on whether or not the system has 1 or 1.4 teraflops of theoretical processing power.

If the system is more powerful than the HD consoles why don't they brag about it?

It is called managing expectations. If people start expecting graphics that surpass Crysis 2 on a high end PC and they get moderate improvements over HD console games they will be much more disappointed than if they were expecting something that was on par with the HD consoles.

SMG is the product of familiarity with the gamecube tech that's been out for many many years before it came out though =P

I don't think we're talking about the same thing ...

Everytime the rumours about the Wii U have changed you can see the opinions of some people flip-flop between "The Wii U being more powerful is meaningless because the HD consoles are good enough anyways" and "The Wii U is garbage because it is not dramatically more powerful than the HD consoles"

Overprice? Really? The Wii was the least expensive of the three consoles at launch (and came with a bundled game).

And how would overpricing your console limit it's power? I'm confused...

It's the old Vladimir Cole fallacy. Cheaper console sold at a profit = ripoff. Expensive console sold at a loss = god's gift to gamers.

If this is the case, then I am afraid Patcher was right... scary.