I think they missed (by not investing just a little bit more into hardware) opportunity to make console that is from the start undoubtedly more powerful than PS360, specially in the eyes of 3rd parties that want to port current and future titles with ease - press they are getting in the last few days from them is not very flattering for their brand new platform that is advertised as next-gen, and struggles to show any improvement over current-gen.

Will that impact overall success of WiiU? It might to a degree, if in next year we see more and more devs deciding not to port to it (thus hurting "hardcore" audience), but at the end it will probably be "casuals" that decide how well WiiU will do.

That said, I'm sure 1st party titles will look and play great as always, and that's what most important when it comes to Ninty consoles. But, yes, it is shame about missed potential SNES2 opportunity.

The WiiU is very similar to the SNES in terms of hardware design. Weak CPU, but powerful graphics chips. Usually early SNES games look worse than early MD games due to easiness of programming, but later SNES games look better than later MD games.
I believe we might see something similar once devs gets used to the Wii U.

What I expect is that a lot of new Engines like the next Unreal/square enix engine will not work on the Wiiu something that I expect for a lot of developpers who will end up saying fuck u to Nintendo and just don't make a Wii U version.

The 8GB version seems like a real waste in my opinion. There's no reason not to buy a Premium bundle, much better value for money.

Wii u can run square enix's engine. They already said so.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/356105/luminous-engine-scalable-from-next-gen-to-ipad-square/

Not sure about unreal.

The general assumption (at this point in time) that people are going off of is that the Wii U's CPU is somewhat weaker than the PS3 and XBox 360's CPU but that the GPU is significantly more powerful ...

Soon after Nvidia bought PhysX I remember them showing off a demo of a (at the time) new game that was on the PC using their newest graphics card (the Geforce 9800 IIRC) and the GPU was able to handle the physics engine while rendering the game with ease. From what I remember of the discussion, the Physics engine was using (something like) 10% of the GPU's total processing power but was more demanding than anything that could run on a CPU. The reason for this is that a modern GPU can (in theoritical performance) be about 10 to 40 times as powerful as a CPU when it comes to floating point calculations that can be performed in highly distributed algorithms, and a physics engine is a (near) perfect match for this.

We don't know much about the Wii U's hardware, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the physics engine offloaded to the GPU and the workload on the CPU to be reduced enough that it doesn't matter whether it is super powerful.

I don't think the Wii U will replicate the phenomenon that was the Wii craze and I don't think anyone expects it to. The technophiles all over the net are really down on the Wii U but I think they'll be in for a rude awakening once the real PS4/NextBox specs are revealed. I expect there to be much more parity this gen but that remains to be seen. The vast majority of consumers don't really care about how fast the RAM and CPU are. This is why the Wii dominated for the better part of last gen. The Wii U should be fine and will definitely get its fair share of great games. I'm not expecting Western devs to really back the system regardless, no matter if it had lightning fast RAM or a GPU quadruple the speed of PS360.

Just give me EAD games, show me what Retro has cookin', give me the next Monolith epic, and, in the meantime, give me MoHun3 Ultimate and I'm GOOD!

But the Wii U version of BLOPS 2 is the best version.

I agree 100%. It could of been the PS2 all over again, and this is  actually what I thought and hoped they'd do back in 2009/10 when people were merely speculating about Nintendo's next console.

They should have released a $399 system (incured a tiny loss), with 250GB HDD, 6GB RAM and CPU/GPU combo where the High end PC version of starwars 1313 showcased at E3 would be the graphical base of the consoles graphical prowess. It would make all the difference in the world because the uninformed core gamer would take its seriously when the next gen iterations of the mass market games arrive, the Wii U version would be in the same graphical bracket as the ps4/720 versions. For many it would make the system a plausible purchase even if you weren't a massive fan of Nintendo's 1st party stuff, ala PS2. It would be the cheapest of the 3 systems yet still offer the next wave of AAA titles.

As things stand its likely that if you want to play ME4 or something similar your going to have to purchase a ps4/720. If developers are already having difficulties porting current gen games (and having them run the same) on to the Wii U, how much harder is it going to become in 2014? And if they did would the graphical difference and social dynamic of the platform render the Wii U version irrelevant (COD wii)?

Its not a conspiracy, it is cost-benefit analysis ...

As a publisher you have a fixed budget on what you can spend on game development in a given year, and this money must be distributed across multiple developers targeting a variety of platforms for games that will release over the next 3 years. Certainly, the studio who you outsourced the Mass Effect 3 port wanted a budget large enough to support 2 years of work with 20 developers to ensure that the game looked as good as possible and fully took advantage of the Wii U but they were only given 9 months with 12 developers because EA thought that money would see a better return on a different project.

Essentially, cost benefit analysis is at the core of Nintendo's problems when it comes to attracting strong third party support. If you have an industry full of "analysts" who project that your system will only sell 20 million units before you launch, or that your success is a fad and no-one will be buying your system 12 months from now, it is difficult to convince third party publishers to devote one of their best development teams for 2 years with a budget of $20 Million to produce an exclusive game for your platform.