More power = Higher Price and also higher possibilities for failure rates
Wii U will be lucky to sell the basic model at $300. 

You can already tell there was compromise made in order to sell the Wii U. Hard Drive space is the most obvious. Only 8gig for basic model(which will be the best selling)? Really? This is 2012. 8gigs is useless for digital downloads. 

It is likely that the machine uses DDR3 and the GPU uses a 55nm process in order to incorporate renesas electronics ED-RAM. It matches with the technology available from them and the original process node that the R700 series of GPUs from AMD released on. Also it means that any of the Wii parts they use are straight optical shrinks and won't require reworking.

I want that transparent console, too!

Not for the majority of VC / WiiWare type games, which is what will be mainly offered on the Wii U's eShop.  You could have literally dozens of these titles stored on the original Wii's paltry 512MB of internal storage, of which only roughly 400MB was alotted for downloaded files and game saves.

Plus, pop in another SD memory card (which are going for a mere $7 for 8GB or $15 for 32GB on Amazon as we speak), or hook up a 500GB external HDD (which go for around $60-$70 tops these days), and you've got plently of cheap storage alternatives to work with, as opposed to having Nintendo jack up the price of the hardware by another $50 or more for including a proprietary HDD like the 360 has, which greatly limits your options for storage expandability.

Looks like the Wii U is going to a really sexy machine, mostly in terms of hardware design.

@se7en7thre3: Have you seen the bird and the wave race demo? That's suppose to be their milestone for graphics, but I can't help it to still be skepticle about it... -_-'