People need to remember portable mode will be much more usable now with better battery life. 5-8hrs now looks much more likely. Also the portable performance is pretty much aligned with last generation. The nvidia architecture is definitely going to outperform the radeon in the wii u at 176 gflops and the cpu performance is probably somewhere between 360 and ps3 in real terms a huge upgrade on wii u. Not forgetting 4GB of memory which will make downscaled/downgraded versions of PS4/xbone games possibly although I still think we may only get a small number of those.
I personally see nothing negative here. It has prevented the portable mode being awful to be quite honest.
The difference in gpu performance between portable and docked is so large that perhaps not only a boost to 1080p but maybe even 60fps over 30 fps for some titles.
I really think this is capable of some amazing VR experiences too. Skyrim VR, Fallout 3 VR, Call of Duty VR etc.
