I embrace the hope that this is all a strategy to play dumb and let them all believe Wii U will be on par with this gen hd consoles when it actually isn't and they will unveil the truth on next year E3.

yea i dont' think people realize that no matter what ps4 and 720 can do that they are still restricted by the 1080p resolution foudn in tv's

Agreed, 100%.

While none of us really know for sure, it is extremely unlikely that Microsoft's and Sony's next consoles will dwarf the Wii U like their respective consoles did the Wii this gen.  Not unless they're coming out much later than we think or they plan on losing a lot of money from the get go, which Sony in particular has learned is not in their best interest.

yea i mean whats the best looking game out there?  battlefield 3?

so lets say all of ps4 games look like battlefield 3, and Wii U just looks like Uncharted 3.  That is no where near the gap that was Wii and PS3

Well they can't "always" be behind, because sooner or later graphic capability is going to reach a point where at least the human eye can't notice a difference. We're pretty close to that point already. I still don't believe Sony and MS's next consoles could possibly look much more noticably better than PS3/360/Wii U, at least not enough to warrant the purchase of a new $300-$400 console.

It's not even an issue of the human eye, from what some of our more tech-learned posters have been saying, apparently when you push too much further beyond the GPU rumored to be in Wii U, you're talking about rendering more polygons than there are pixels in 1080p, which would be fairly pointless...

Unfortunately the answer is probably yes, but I would like to give two reasons for this that nobody else is likely going to make in this debate. Firstly that controller will be a large consumer of console price. There is no way around this if Nintendo intends to have a reasonable entry price. Maybe not half the cost, but a quarter to a third of the console pricing is going to be this controller. Given the launch window it is hard to imagine the console coming to market without a game either for that matter.

Secondly are we forgetting the basics when it comes to game development. There is a learning curve as far as new consoles are concerned. Developers simply will not be pushing the limits of the hardware within the first year, and Nintendo didn't exactly push the limits of their hardware this generation. The fact that the specs haven't seemingly been finalized doesn't bode well for any developer Nintendo included having a good span of time to work with the tech.

So you will probably have a console going through growing pains. While developers have had five years to get the most out of the other two existing consoles. The games on those consoles are still going to look better. Further more I am sorry that is a damn small box, and Nintendo isn't notorious for building in a lot of redundant hardware in the first place. So stream lined and better maybe, but Microsoft/Sony use loss leading models. Which Nintendo doesn't do. A year later both will come to market with much more powerful consoles with more redundancy. Yes they will have growing pains as well, but their hardware will have more room for sloppy development.

I am sorry there just isn't a compelling argument for Nintendo pulling off a graphical coup. They are splitting the cost between two parts. Have a severely truncated development cycle. Are facing competition that splurges, and are supposed to pull this all off with what we all expect is a one year window. You have to admit this is all too far fetched to be believed. Can we be honest Nintendo is scrambling with this. By the time they get their shit straight it will be far past a time when they might have had a slim hope. There is simply too much to do, and not enough time.

Yep, I doubt the Wii U will have any problem in delivering current PC games at maximum settings limited to 1080p with 60fps. What else you can do? You can use more sophisticated lighting effects, but that will require a lot of power and most people will not see the difference and upgrade the textures, which is very expensive to develop and, more important, will make loading times very boring. The Wii U will be fine. Whatever Microsoft and Sony are cooking, it will not rely in graphical power to surpass their current platforms.

Now the Wii definitely uses matured hardware - but the Gamecube and N64? Come on.