Bingo. I want to say that we knew a while back that Nintendo would be using "high capacity discs" of some sort, and it's been easy to put 2 and 2 together from Nintendo's history with disc formats that they would be using a Blu-Ray knockoff

Blu-ray is a format and marketing brand of blue laser optical discs.

The Wii U will not use "Blu-ray" but rather a blue laser based optical disc from Matsushita that is closer to China Blue High Definition Disc in format than Blu-ray.

The only reason they said "Blu-ray" was to notate it will be a high definition blue laser based medium.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was Bluray tech, but just not including the software to read bluray movies. The only thing that really matters is that it will support high capacity dics for games, but will not play any disc based movies. But with Netflix, this isn't a big deal.

them words right out mah mouf! by that, i mean, my lisp, stuttering dilemma. Blu-Ray, nay; we have Mario!

Strictly speaking they won't be Blu-Ray discs in the same way that Wii titles aren't DVDs. Nintendo will use a proprietry format as they did with the Wii, with the OS not having the codecs neccessary to play DVD and Blu-Ray films. If they do the same thing they did with the Wii we'll probably see single layer discs having a 25GB capacity and later on down the line we'll see a firmware update allowing the use of dual or perhaps even triple layer discs.

It'll be a Blu-Ray disc in everything but name pretty much.

As for Blu-Ray writers that's pretty standard. Dev kits and test kits will run titles from bog standard writable Blu-Rays in the same way that Wii dev kits and test kits can run titles from bog standard writable DVDs.

Reggie has already confirmed that Wii U won't have Blu ray and will be running proprietary optical disc technology.

If it looks like a Bu-Ray, walks like a Blu-Ray and quacks like a Blu-Ray, its a Blu-Ray lol. Like I've said, it's going to be similar to the Wii and DVDs. All it would need to run Blu-Ray films is a Homebrew Media Player with the necccessary codecs. It will be a proprietary format, of course, but the dev and test kits will run on bog standard writable Blu-Ray discs and DVDs, hence the news of developers and publishers getting the hardware and software needed if they don't already have the hardware from PS3 projects.

Maybe they will use an HD DVD drive.

In regards to Blu-Ray, in my defense, I am not of American descent and I am bilingual

Incorrect.  The discs and drives must come from Matsushita.   You can't take a blank Blu-ray writable disc, write game code to it and expect it to run on a Wii U test kit.

I explained in my post above what the optical media is.

And where have you heard of devs writing their Wii code to standard blank DVD's?   They were all written to special Matsushita discs, not off the shelf DVD media.