I don't doubt the power behind the Vita.Oh, deffo - rarely any game used the full potential (Black being one of the rare instances - it practically looks like an X-Box game), but we have something else to thank for as far as the PS2 is concerned - it's one of the first platforms that did not render polygons when they were outside of the screen boundry - normally they'd be drawn anyways since they were within the drawing distance. That allowed for pumping out "more" polygons than the GPU could technically handle, and most, if not all systems use that technique now - it's the PS2's legacy. Even the DS used that technique by rendering only the part of the model that could be seen, resulting in amazing 3D games like Metroid Prime Hunters on hardware that, for all intents and purposes, shouldn't be able to produce such stellar graphics.
...but I digress.
Off topic- you reckon it's powerful to emulate the PS2 or gamecube. Who's not waiting for that day?
CPU: 4-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore @1.2GHZ - 800MHz
SGX543MP4 (four cores) @200MHz thats delivers 133 million polygons per second and fill rates in excess of 4Gpixels/sec.
128MB Video RAM
Maybe those clock speeds are even higher.