It's worth noting that the Nintendo social network is actually a web API that is provided and maintained by a third party. It's not part of the firmware, so there was no "root access". In addition, it is very likely what they saw was some version of the moderator interface.
Pretty sure the WiiU CPU carries a PS3-style internal encription scheme, so save state exploits and regular Wii tomfoolery (outside the Wii sandbox) will be pretty hard.
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