Most of people think that hey said this because they wanted to make the console look more "powerful" than next gent, which is not true.
They do meant that the wii u was more powerful that what people thought, but their point also was that there was no need for a more powerful system, since you can already do everything on consoles with this kind of specs. And that now the real thing that was important was gameplay, since most of developers started to worry more about shaders, higher polycount and higher res textures than making a good quality experience. Which is something I agree too. Games look awesome these days, and I really think that we got to the point where we don't need any more power, maybe just a little tweak here and there, but that's it (just look how halo 4 looks on the x-box 360, do we really need more than that?). But whatever, most of consumers just want the same thing but in "HD", so the market will always aim there.