Everyone seems to be linking Zelda U's delay to the NX, and its easy to see why. The major claim is that it's going to have a dual platform release (like Twilight Princess on Gamecube/Wii), and the main counter-claim is that it's not going to be a home console.
There is a lot of evidence suggesting Wii-U is up for replacement in 2016. Since the Playstation 4 and Xbox One were released, sales of the Wii-U stagnated, and have ground to a halt since December. There's no new third party retail games coming out for it (thanks partially due to the boycotts and flamewars directed at Watch Dogs and Sonic Boom), and the only games we'll see for it definitely this year is Splatoon and Yoshi's Wooly World. With no new games, nobody will buy a system, and both new and preowned units are bound to gather dust on store shelves for the foreseeable future.
The only evidence against this is that the Wii-U has being on sale since 2012 (4 years in 2016), and the 3DS since 2011 (5 years in 2016), so due to age the 3DS will be replaced sooner. However the DS (2004) had a lifetime of 7 years and the Wii (2006) had 6 years - the handheld lasting longer. In addition, the Virtual Boy lasted only 6 months on the market before it was pulled. There's nothing stopping Nintendo pulling another white elephant from the market and replacing it sooner rather than later.
If Zelda-U will also be on NX, at the very least it gives us an idea of what hardware the new system will have. For a straight port, it would mean the following specifications at a minimum:
- PowerPC Processor (4 cores @ 2ghz minimum) - Hopefully a G5 rather than a G3.
- 4 GB+ Shared RAM (2 GB accessible by developers)
- AMD Graphics processor that exceeds the Wii-U (and maybe matching the PS4/Xbone)
- Blu-Ray Drive
- 500 GB+ Hard Drive (for digital downloads)
- Wii U Gamepad emulation (possibly via New 3DS?)
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