You realize the facial animations during the directs (in the parts made specifically for it, like the character talking to the viewer) won't have work put on them, right? on the actual game, faces will act normally.

Hopefully. Though it's to be released in Japan in two weeks and that stuff was near final.

It still is the only new JRPG i'm interested in though.

Now, I'd like to see if the ENTIRE game was "downgraded" as people claim. Comparisons when the game releases will be needed. 

Also, are both scenes in the same time of day? The time of day can potentially lead to differences in lighting conditions. 

It's a moving object that passes by in the background for two seconds, people aren't going to notice its textures more than the floor shot, which is much more clearly visible for a much longer period. If they went to the trouble of trying to hide the doll's textures, they would have tried to hide the floor as well.

And motion blur doesn't come for free; it requires processing power to implement, so its addition is a graphical upgrade.

No one is claiming that and it's not true. there's video proof of it.

How I wish they'd included a 128 GB SSD. Wii U games could be pushed harder if there was meaningful space on the internal drive. 

More internal space and thus faster loading times would only mean faster loading times. UE3 games wouldn't have texture loading issues like in the Batman Arkham games. That's it.

There's as well no need for more VRAM*, the GPU wouldn't benefit from it. But more main RAM would've been useful to load more data at once and have less reloads. Having 1.5-2GB free for games would have been great. And 1.5 should be possible if Nintendo got the memory footprint of the OS dowwn.

*Unified RAM, though it seems like up to 512MB is used for graphics.

Pretty sure the 1GB of RAM Wii U has available to games is unified.

Look at the little star. ;)

Unified just means that devs can handle how they share it between GPU and CPU. And that in blocks of a typical size. Now lets say Mario Kart 8 does not need much main RAM. That could likely mean that they can use up to 768MB for graphics.
Though the likely Wii U GPU, i'd still guess on a Redwod based one, wouldn't benefit much from more than 512MB. If it is RV730 based, that did not benefit from 1GB at all as PC graphicscard.

On the opposite we have a Xenoblade X. That might need up to 768MB for data. So there would be 256MB left for graphics.

Now Wii U has unified,but not heterogenous memory. So there's always a rate at which memory is shared between CPU and GPU. The exact rate depends on needs and adressable block sizes. Most of Nintendos typical first party games probably don't need that much main RAM. So there should be more than enough free GPU memory.
Xenoblade might be the first game where Wii U is somewhat short of memory and the GPU might get less than it could utilize.
Having 1.5GB free memory could probably reduce those issues.

That is not more than a smart guess. But it's not unrealistic.

XCX definitely looks like the most memory-intensive Wii U game to date, so it's not too far fetched to theorize that it might be the first to really hit the limits of what you can do with 1GB of unified GDDR3.