This is what I thought. It's gotta be an online/Miiverse thing because on the Wii Menu itself I get no freezing and when I deleted the internet connection I got no freezing on games. No need for people to go crazy and send in their Wii U's or return/exchange them. If Nintendo knows what's up they're going to fix it. They kinda have to.
I started experiencing this today, too, even though me and some friends played it for 5 hours straight day one with no freezes at all. It did it two times today before I deleted the internet connection. Everything worked fine after that. I'm not sure if it really fixed it or not, but I guess more play time will tell. Hopefully this is figured out and corrected after a patch without needing to fix something else.