No, it's not. That is to say, the word that the Doc says isn't "gigawatts". He says "jigga-watts". The correct pronunciation of the term has a hard "g", like in "good", and any actual scientist would know this. Besides which, if I'm not mistaken, he uses it as a measure of energy, rather than power (which is rate of change in energy over time), and therefore it cannot be GW.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gigawatt

it can be pronouced both ways. listen to the audios lol.

Also power is the rate at which energy is converted (unit of power = Watts) and energy is how much  is used over a period of time (unit of energy = Watthours).

so he did mean power as he said needs to generate.

Merriam-Webster is an American dictionary that is for the lay person. Non-Americans and scientists only ever pronounce it with the hard "g".

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gigawatt

Note that it doesn't provide two different pronunciations. As for SI, have a read of the (sourced) Wikipedia section:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_Prefixes#Pronunciation

And I'm working from memory regarding his usage of the term, but what you should note is that he talks about charging up the flux capacitor. Now, a capacitor doesn't store power, it stores energy. When he talks of "needing 1.21 gigawatts of power", he's actually crossing wires, and mixing scientific terminology with lay terminology - he needs some amount of energy to use the capacitor, but the lay person often uses "power" in place of "energy". As an example, consider that you almost certainly refer to "how much power is left in the battery" - batteries, like capacitors, don't store power, they store energy. Power is the unit you would use to describe the rate at which the battery is charging or discharging. If Doc Brown had said "I need 1.21 gigawatts of power for 1 second", I'd have no problem - he just needs 1.21 GJ. He didn't - he said he needs 1.21 GW of power to "power the flux capacitor" (what does that even mean?).

Also, for the record, the Watt-hour isn't actually a normal unit of energy. That would be the Joule (which is, in fact, the Watt-second, if you want to use non-SI units). While the "kilowatt-hour" is a more common unit than the watt-hour, it's one of those stupid inventions of engineers because they have trouble with changing units. The kilowatt-hour is 3.6*10^6 Joules or 3.6 MJ.

You're both kinda missing my point. The misspelling is deliberate, as is the mockery of Doc Brown's pronunciation. The point is that it's irrelevant technojargon. What matters is not gigawatts, what matters is that Marty needs a time machine and a lightning bolt to power it.

What matters about the Wii U is whether it will be a time machine (compelling entertainment device) and whether it will have a lightning bolt to power it (compelling content). How many millions of texels the hardware can process is very much beside the point.

Play4fun is on the right track in saying that the interest in power is due to interest in whether Wii U can share in premium next-gen multiplats or not. I don't actually believe power matters there, either. Unreal Engine 3 got scaled down to a freakin' iPhone 3GS, but somehow a hundred million Wiis weren't worth the effort. Whatever Nintendo's problem is with attracting multiplatform titles, I'm not convinced power has a damn thing to do with it. The Wii U's support for well-known shaders will probably have more impact on the software support it gets than how many floating point operations it can perform in one second.

I also think power has little (if any) to do with why Nintendo gets so little quality 3rd party support.I think the answer, or at least one of them, is that a lot of 3rd parties, especially Western ones, just don´t like Nintendo.Yes, I think it´s that simple.

At least as far as PC centric 3rd parties go, I don´t see them supporting Nintendo, just a little bit at best.I´ll be VERY, EXTREMELY surprised if games like Fallout and/or Elder Scrolls are ever released on a Nintendo system.

I see the Wii U as a platform that might have great Japanese 3rd party support, both in quantity and quality.Not so promising for Western 3rd party down the road, though, even if it looks promising now, with games like Arkham City, Mass Effect 3, etc..also releasing on the system.

Doc doesn't say, "1.21 gigawatts of power."  He says, "1.21 gigawatts of electricity."   He does at one point ask himself how he will generate that kind of 'power'.

The Wii U is the Xbox 720, two Xbox 360s duct-taped together.

Well the fact that it's more powerful than the 360/PS3 isn't the real issue here. It's more of a question of whether the Wii U is powerful enough to hang with the big boys when they are eventually released a year or two down the line.

I think Famousringo has it right.  It wasn't flat out power that robbed the Wii of ports, it was its architecture.  The Wii was built from the Gamecube, so it utilized the TEV.  Only a handful of developers really exploited it the first time around, and one of the best went out of business early in the generation (Factor 5 - I blame Lair for that).

Once the new generation came around, everyone was just using the shaders found on the 360 and PS3.  You couldn't just port those down to the Wii easily.  The graphics needed to be done differently on the TEV to look good.  Since no one really learned on the Gamecube, it seems like they just said, "Screw it.  We aren't learning for the Wii either."

Since the Wii U has modern shaders, I don't think that will be a problem.  The Wii U should get all the big games.  I guess we will see if it does.

Unfortunately it seems that it doesn't have modern enough shaders (R700, DX10.1 spec shaders)  which seems to be left in the dust, with at least UE4 (we will see about other next gen engines) which requires DX11 spec shaders. So it seems that they will again be shut out due to an outdated architecture. Tho it shouldn't be as bad this time round as the gap between DX10 and DX11 is not quite as big as Programable Shaders vs TEV. In theory 95% of the things you can do with a DX11 spec GPU, you should be able to do with a DX10.1 GPU with to the metal programing, tho it may be slower to the point where it's not worth it.