"I already thought it was an issue with the Wii, but now it's even worse"

Well, I'd guess you can still pan around and control the map with the gamepad... By input I meant actual commands for the characters on screen.

From the looks of the games shown so far... no? ZombiU seems to make excellent use of it. Batman Arkham City does as well, allowing easier changing between tools/weapons. Pikmin appears to be using it as an external map, which is always useful.

Note the first picture. If you play with a wii remote, you can still get the map on the gamepad. You just wouldn't be using it for input.

According to Nintendo's E3 website, aliens colonial marines is scheduled for release February 12, 2013. I can't imagine that means the release for other systems, or why would they put it on the wii u specific site?

Nintendo doesn't typically release numbers on that kind of stuff. They tend to let the output speak for itself.

Unknown, no(it has limited flash storage and USB storage capability) and a proprietary Nintendo one.

Reads title: "Nintendo’s Wii U Hardware Conference"

I DEMAND AT LEAST 45 DIFFERENT TEAMS WORKING CONCURRENTLY SO I CAN GET A NEW ZELDA GAME EVERY MONTH.

Oh, ok, I'll get right on that. Oh, right, I already did and now work as a graphics programmer. Oops. Sorry, but when you're streaming uncompressed video over a wireless connection, halving the framerate halves the bandwidth required.

[www.engadget.com]

I haven't found one that says it doesn't either. I HAVE seen things like "When you use two, the framerate halves to 30 frames per second.", which implies that, for any given game, running with a single controller means a solid 60fps. He didn't say "for games running at 60fps" or have any qualifier like that.

Any stream going out to the pads would have to come from the same GPU doing the processing for the whole console(just from different framebuffers). If you're updating those framebuffers at 60fps but only have enough bandwidth to send the info at 30fps, you *could* end up with some bizzare tearing issues on the…

IBM reported last year that it's running the same CPU architecture as Watson(that'd be Power 7). AMD Reported around the same time that its chip is based on the R770 architecture. Both were reported here as well as Engadget and most other news sites.

No clue. With so much of this being translated from Japanese, I keep hearing rumors about this with no source for whether they're true.

True that it's not wireless anymore, though I think most people probably play with their current wireless controllers plugged in a lot of the time, but I'm willing to concede that point. Just depends how important it is to you.

"since the hardware specs on the Wii U aren't impressive..."

Well, that depends. If this is a performance limitation, you're right, developers can alleviate it. If the Wii U's wireless streaming is bandwidth-limited, causing this drop, then no. No matter how simple of a scene they render for the pads, they'd still use the same bandwidth.

It uses an AC adapter, so plug it in near wherever you're sitting.

Well, reports from devs have been pretty scattered, with some saying it's inferior, others saying it's vastly superior, and others saying it's equal.