This is where I quip "Haven't you heard? Nintendo is always doomed no matter what they do! Even at the height of the Wii era there were people who just wanted them to die, etc."...well, you catch my drift.
Going back to the ARM vs. x86 vs. POWER architecture chips, I recall Iwata mentioning he wanted the the new hardware to "adequately absorb/run Wii U architecture". What would prevent x86 from doing so, compared to, say, ARMs chips? Isn't the harder part to emulate about the hardware always that "eccentric" RAM?
The only thing I can think off is some presentation AMD made about a chip that has both an x86 and ARM instruction set on it.