"Wii U hardware is on par with current gen consoles"

[M.U.G.E.N]

so far means he is talking about the 4th or the 5th dev kit if I'm not mistaken. So I don't think it's the earliest dev kits and must be quite close to the finalized version given the release time frame. I also think many actually 'hoped' it would be significantly more powerful than the current gen given how old current gen is. the slightly more powerful aspect came up in the recent rumors

but I agree that we should wait for it to come out. At E3 we should see enough to come to a better conclusion