Length of a console generation, Wii U too late!?

[HappySqurriel]

I just wanted to expand upon my earlier post being that I thought of an additional point ...

With how high output resolutions have become, and with how little of a difference people see between HD resolutions, even if the Wii U is significantly less powerful than its competition Nintendo and third party developers have an unprecedented ability to hide the lack of performance of the system.

If you look at benchmarks of games like Crysis 2 and the difference in processing power required to output them at a resolution similar to 1080p @ 60fps at the highest level of detail and compare that to the hardware required to play the same game at a resolution similar to 1280x1080 @ 30fps at the second highest level of detail you will notice a drastic difference in hardware capabilities; but if you look at the visual result of these configuration changes the perceived difference in quality is fairly minimal.

Now, if people notice that the same games are released on the Wii U as their next generation competition and they only see minor visual differences with some "technical mumbo-jumbo" claims of why Nintendo’s competition is so much more powerful, it becomes a lot more difficult to sell your system based on performance reasons alone. While everyone could see the difference in capabilities of the Wii and the HD consoles by looking at screenshots or videos, it may be far less noticeable in the next generation to see the difference between the high performance and low performce systems.