Yep, the GameCube was such a masterpiece when it came out. I still remember the jaw dropping graphics of metroid prime especially when fighting ridley and it was all 60fps. Do you see the nx doing anything out of the ordinary when it comes to "exotic" hardware? Edram for higher bandwidth? Anything?
I truly believe GameCube was the "perfect" hardware solution for Nintendo. They didn't brute force anything, but the real world performance was so incredible. I think one key component that made that all possible was the Mosys 1T-SRAM(the CPU & GPU were no slouch either). I remember Factor 5 was praising how amazingly fast it was, saying that they were caught by surprise, because they were already feeding the system huge amounts of data, yet, the more they fed it, it just kept blazing through it all. The access speed was just incredibly fast, like cache, some said.
I'd like to see Nintendo pursue a similar solution again. Embedded memory on the GPU for Frame buffer and other stuff, and a sizeable super-fast system memory for graphical/low-latency tasks, with an additional large pool of slower memory to handle slower/higher latency stuff(streaming, sound, etc). This strategy allowed them to create affordable, yet, very high performance hardware. I know they were worried about the cost of such exotic memory going forward, but I'm sure it could be cheaper now, and they could probably get by with less total memory than current consoles(eg: 64MB embedded, 1GB fast mem1?, 4GB slow mem2).
It's not like those 8GB of current gen significantly boosted their performance, but - in theory - is a bottleneck since the disc would take a long time filling just a fraction of that. Apple's iPhone gets by with a seemingly meager amount of system memory compared to Android devices, because what they have is tuned for performance, rather than brute force. Not sure why Nintendo abandoned GameCube's exotic memory solution when it produced such great result for decent cost, and a lot less silicon. I'm as curious as you about whether such a design is feasible this time around.