Making characters emote is art direction. They can be achieved with simple graphics. While it was more obvious in later games, Mario and Link were very expressive in their N64 incarnations.
Powerful hardware alone can realize a lot of things. Good art direction isn't one of them.
And according to the rhetoric of some, Wii U is severely underpowered, so I don't know what they're trying to prove. Are they saying that Wii U is, in fact, capable?
While the gaming community often acts like they are different things, art style is also graphics. Graphics is a much broader category than number of polygons and stuff. Hell, Epic Yarn won best graphics awards against HD games and that's a Wii game.