By avoiding a pipeline with many NOP Instructions a system that has less FLOPs can outperform another just by being more efficient. tThe Wii U's may be an interesting sample of this scenario.
Modern computers usually have their potential limited when their CPU and GPU pipelines become filled with NOP instructions (which commonly happens because they are waiting for the RAM memory to send data to them). Wii U's eDRAM plays a important role to avoid this scenario because it is not relatively fast but its latency is relatively low as well.
And about what Shin'en said, while it is nice to see a developer giving a details about the system, all the thinks at the interview were already known (if you understant a bit of how computers work and games are made).
