Simple:

On one hand, you have people who believe the Wii U is in the same league as the PS3 and 360 in terms of horsepower, based on the evidence so far provided to the consumer in the form of the games that have been released so far for the console. Could be slightly more powerful than those consoles, but still in the same league. Factual observations are king here. People judge the hardware based on the performance of the titles released for the console so far.

On the other hand, you have people grasping at every straws possible to come up with reasons why the games released for the Wii U so far haven't placed the console in a class clearly above the HD twins. Assumptions made facts rule for this group. People of this group believe the developers releasing games for the Wii U are lazy and don't give their games any love when making them for the console. And Nintendo don't push their consoles at all. Not even with Pikmin and SM3DW.

Both sides arguing over this because, most likely, they're bored. I know I am.

That's it's theoretical limit ... No amount of cache will increase it ... It will probably help sustain the real world application performance but it can't go above that 15 Gflops limit. 

Not grasping at straws; using common sense and logic.

It's common sense that ports designed for other consoles with different architecture and an extra 6-7 years of dev experience won't show a new system's full power. Especially when they don't even use the system's larger RAM.

It's also clear that Nintendo hasn't pushed the hardware either given that (A) their games so far are simplistic in design and do not prioritise graphics, and (B) they themselves are inexperienced in both HD development and programmable shaders.

Real world performance is more important than theoretical, because the former is what we'll actually see in games.

Actually there are cases where you will hit theoretical performances in applications such as bitcoin mining and ray tracing. To HPC workloads it is very important to have high theoretical performance because these applications depend on throughput.

So... do you guys get up in the morning and say: "Jeez, I feel like arguing today"

Anyway, this thread is quite entertaining and its neat to see the different views that people have regarding graphix and performance of consoles, specially the wiiU, keep it up guys

Are you learning anything from this thread yet ? 

People mine bitcoins on Wii U?

Yea, quite a bit, didn't realize how much theories and facts and assumptions  goes into determining how much power a console has... Hard to tell who is winning though since both of you make valid points as well as odd ones

You get the idea ... It's not as black and white as it seems on performance. There ARE applications that are bounded by theorectical performance. Rendering in general is becoming more bounded by the shading power of a GPU.