You always get your Nintendo fans who are hoping for amazing performance from new Nintendo consoles and on the face of it, its realistic to expect the wii U to be more powerful than 360/PS3 because of the wii U being much later but both of those consoles were brought to market making a huge loss and financially neither have been successful...
Personally I think the new Xbox and PS4/Orbis won't be as ambitious as many are hoping for either. So we may find that despite the wii U not being as powerful as we hoped it still won't be that far behind Orbis and PS4 which may end up being only 2-5x as powerful as the earlier generations. The xbox 360 is at least 10x as powerful as the original xbox overall and I don't think we are going to get that difference this time around. I think its all about launching at a competitive price point. I personally think this is the sane thing to do. I went through about 7 faulty 360s as I was an early adopter and it was a complete farce. My 60GB PS2 compatible PS3 has never gone wrong but many have reported problems. This time around it seems like consoles will use mature technology that will hopefully be robust and reliable which I'm quite happy about.
Also lets not forget the wii U will have advantages not directly understood on analysis of the specification to do with modern manufacturing processes. If the gpu, gpu memory, cpu, cpu cache and a few other functions are all integrated onto one large i.c. then the wii U will have incredibly low latency and huge memory bandwidth which will enable the console to be pushed beyond what you expect for the hardware and even just fitting 768M or 1GB of memory gives it clear advantages over 360 and PS3. Also the wii U has a high density optical drive which the 360 hasn't.
this is just a perfectly-phrased analysis... thanks for this