joutei

I just had to register and ad to this conversation. 

Tessellation is a important part of the new Generation of gaming. 

1. You can develop games faster: 

Think of minecraft, blockey as hell, not a good looking game by any standards, with tessellation(built in the GPU) the artist could basically get a round head(real head) only by using the GPU, no remodeling need.

2. The polygon count is low:

Making less stress on CPU and GPU focusing on other stuff to make your game look good, also getting down production time, letting the dev have more time on story and level design. 

3. Cheaper to make:

To OP raising a valid question about the capabilities of the wiiU, Luckely it has at least Computer structuring witch is a really important part of the "NG" consoles aswell, however if they aren't going to support GPU tessellation built in they are going to have to make more modeling work to make the game look good, hurting the devs and make them not want to release on the wiiU. Who would want to play a minecraft game when the same game look like fable on xbox8 and ps4 (using extremes but about right, look into the unity engine heaven demo with and without tess).

Only thing holding back game progress is the PS3 and xbox360 right now, using this hi polygon games with no tessellation(not GPU integrated) to make them look good, and they are, but hogging resources, making hi CPU cost on ports to PC. Im afraid the Ps3 and x360 not going to die anytime soon and in turn slowing down progress of the new gen. They need to stop supporting last gen fast! or noone going to understand why you should upgrade to the new consoles.

Btw ps3,nintendo=openGL(modeficed) xbox=dx(modeficed)  

dx11 features go along hand in hand with the openGL 4

Unity is saying it supports openGL 3.3(for wiiU) right now, updates are coming in the future.