@Jebe
When I say standard, I'm refering to "console" standards. The PC will never have a standard as new parts are released weekly, and there is no set standard for anything. The PC is always better, but comparing a PC to consoles is an apples to oranges argument.
I personally don't expect the WiiU to do games that are any better graphically than 5+ year old machines that have dialed in there units. A first gen Zelda or Mario will not look any better than a God Of War 3, Uncharted 3, or Gears Of War 3. And even when they do finally start pushing the WiiU graphically, the next 360 and PS3 will be here, and I'm sure those 2 consoles will take a huge step up in regards to what the WiiU can do across the board.
Chris
Really? Do you really want me to do a Valley girl impression? And like totally the 7970 and i7 2700k are so last week. And like when is Intel going to release Ivy Bridge? Happy?
Now that we've gotten that bit of absurdity out of the way, you seem to be having issues related to being so set on "the Wii is last gen" to the point you can't take it back and get a little perspective. The funny thing about the emphasis on multiplatform launches is that engines happen to have been designed to use quad Out of Order cores, and newer APIs then OpenGL 2.0/DirectX 9.
Imagine it or not they even already design to allow for usage of more GPU then:
X1900XTX
375GFLOPS
10.4 GP/s
10.4GT/s
like say a 4770, which was already designed for 40nm? And is you know the baseline where it would make sense to have a discrete GPU chip instead of folding it into a SoC in the 4xxx series? Because believe it or not there is a market where people have even more powerful hardware they sell the exact same games to.
4770
960GFLOPS
12GP/s
24GT/s
Seems as how you want to go there, there's also this little issue that Microsoft thermal design had traditionally had problems with GPUs that didn't have a meaningfully over 100W TDP in their desktop iteration. That combined with the nature of the design factors driving a console, tends to mean they're not liable to use a GPU with a TDP meaningfully over 100W. So for 6xxx series hardware, without relying on a die shrink that would mean a 6770 level card. That incidentally is 800 stream processors verse 640 in a 4770.
The only way a XBox follow on would be able to trump the Wii U to the degree the Wii U will likely humiliate the XBox 360/PS3 is if it focuses on newer process parts, which are just starting to come online, and hence have no reason to mess with VLIW4. Otherwise design constraints mean that the Microsoft and Sony follow ons will be the one's having a difficult time showing a meaningful advantage.
That's not even getting into the fact we're now in the middle of a worldwide recession and repeating the SEGA strategy of overcharging for games to make up for selling the hardware cheaply won't necessarily be repeated. Afterall Microsoft is no longer in the process of trying to establish a brand.