You'll be surprised how much difference an extra 0.5 / 1 / 1.5 GB of RAM would do alone when considering a comparison between the NES 6 and current generation consoles. The current generation consoles are all RAM starved and it's the easiest way to improve the look of next generation titles by raising texture resolution.

Anyway what really matters isn't the current generation graphics hardware but the next generation on the 28nm process node, how much outright performance it offers within their thermal budget, what that thermal budget is and the relative efficiency of a modern GPU at performing modern rendering techniques. A NES 6 GPU would likely be 5 generations newer than current generation consoles. R5xx, R6xx, R7xx, R8xx, R9xx, R1xxx.

If Sega sucked it up I think the DC would have been able to hold it's own during the PS2/GCN/xbox era.  It had several innovations going for it...plus the system wasn't as underpowered as some editors would like people to think!  Besides, I think the graphical diffrence would be negligble even if Nintendo would release a system a year or 1.5 years before the competition.  It's akin to the diffrence between the 360 and PS3 at the moment...and most likely destroy anything PS3 currently offers.  Let's not forget Nintendo offered a powerful and competent hardware that gave the competition some heat(graphics wise)  for the last 2 generations in N64/PS2/Saturn gen and GCN/PS2/Xbox.  I see them opening up their coffers and putting out a beautiful machine.  Look at the leap between the DS and 3DS...it went from N64 type hardware capability to better than Wii (sub360) level capabilities.

My prediction:

Nintendo: Winter 2012-Spring 2013

Microsoft:  Fall 2013-Winter 2013

Sony: Winter 2013- Spring 2014 (gun shy but competitors will force their hand like how Nintendo is forcing them to release the NGP).

Everyone always gets it wrong and sounds stupid with these kind of things lol

why... doesn't everyone totally think Winter 2012 is ripe for a new system?

N6- Late 2012 or early 2013

 PS4- LATE 2015

New XBOX- wish never, but early to mid 2015

my bet is mid/late 2013

wii2: 2012
720: 2012 - 2013
ps4: 2013 - 2014 

playstation will skip the 8th gen and go right  into the 9th gen with the ps4 . Jk

Wow, you really want Sony and Microsoft out of the market that badly?

In the not too distant future (next 18 to 24 months) very low cost hardware will be able to produce graphics that in many ways rivals what people have become accustomed to in big budget pre-rendered movies; certainly, there will still be differences but these will be more in line with watching a 10 year old Pixar movie compared to watching their latest release than what we would currently associate with playing videogames. It isn’t just graphics either, and there will be more processing power and memory available for physics and AI than people know who to take advantage of; after all, I’ve personally seen some very impressive real-time computational fluid dynamics demonstrations on fairly modest modern mid-range PCs.

What this means is we're hitting a point where it will (realistically) take 10 years and 100 times the processing power to create something that has as meaningful of an improvement on processing power as the HD console's had over the Wii. If Nintendo chooses to release a fairly modest gaming console in 2012, even if Sony or Microsoft release their system at $200 more expensive than Nintendo's system launched at, the processing power improvement Sony and Microsoft would receive by launching 2 years later will be meaningless.

If this happened, Nintendo would have 2 years to do what Sony did in 12 to 18 months with the PS2; and that is to make their next system the "default" choice for consumers and developers. As long as Nintendo doesn't "screw up" this wouldn't be that difficult; and the videogame market would start looking like the MP3 player market.

Now, I want to be clear that this isn't a prediction of what will happen because I honestly don't believe that either Sony or Microsoft would leave Nintendo in the market alone for more than 12 to 18 months

somebody here doesn't like MS...lol!!! Well I for one think 2015 is too late in the ball game for the HD consoles if they do end up releasing it during that time!  Sony for one would love their system to last that long to recoup billions in losses; but it won't happen.  Nintendo WILL release it's new console sometime in late 2012 or early 2013 with Microsoft and Sony following suit 6-12month after that.(I'll give Sony a year and a half since their probably gun shy to go for another console war with the losses they incurred).  I also don't see much of a diffrence in terms of hardware specs bet the 3; and content will determine the winner this time.

That's what i've been saying: Nintendo could easily "beat" the PS360 with a Wii 2 at this point by having something with a CPU nearly identical to the 360's (IBM PowerPC-ish multicore), but having 1 GB of RAM, which at this point would be cheap and easy to provide at the bare minumum, hell it should be easy to provide a system with 360 chip specs but 2 GB of RAM at this point, seeing as how 4 seems to be the standard for any basic new PC sold this year

The RAM boost would give Sony and Microsoft a reason to upgrade without having to break the bank either for themselves or developers, and we could have an even and prosperous generation next time