Does it really matter if it's 1.2ghz or 1.5ghz?
The OMAP 4460 was designed to run at 1.5ghz. Therefore, it's more than capable of running at that speed.
You know, it could well be both. Could be they were clocking it at 1.5GHz, but downclocked later prototypes to meet their battery life goals. Or, better, still (hey, why not add to the mess), maybe it's the other way around. One of the main reasons Apple gets such a good battery life on the iPhone 4 isn't just a big battery, or their fake multitasking, but the fact that Apple has very good power management software. They use the same tech on their laptops, and get twice the typical runtime of most Windows PCs.
What if the early prototypes were downclocked to 1.2GHz to save battery, expecting typical Android performance (Android has long had some work to do on the power management front). But as they got used to playing around and using ICS, they discovered the full 1.5GHz along with way improved power management software would be no problem. Of course, I'd also like to believe the final version uses some new Samsung 32nm wunderchip rather than the TI with the old GPU, but that's seeming less likely.
The only thing that slightly bugs me is the outdated GPU. Any known way of improving graphics performance in the modding community?
I agree about the GPU. Ok, sure, it's clocked at twice the speed of the same GPU in the Galaxy S... but it's pushing 2.4x the pixels. So this ought to seem SLOWER than last year's Samsungs. I don't get why that wouldn't be seen as a major problem on a flagship device. And of course, the SII has the MALI-400, which is already twice as fast as the SGX540 at the same clock speed... or, well, the Adreno 220 if you get your SII from T-Mobile (why do they always pull this stuff... same name, different stuff inside is just as stupid as making up different names for exactly the same device based on the carrier it goes to).
EDIT: It seems like the iPhone 4 had the PowerVR SGX535, but gaming was still heavily marketed by Apple, and my experience with games on the iP4 has been nothing but positive.
Some of it's a matter of comparisons... the Apple 3GS ran the same PowerVR SGX 535, but at a slower clock speed, and the previous iPhones were pretty pathetic. So across all iPhones, the 4 was the leader upon introduction in GPU performance. And any "HD" application was written with it in mind. In short, games were inherently well tuned to the iPhone 4.
In the Android world, it's more like the PC world... new graphically intensive games are likely to be tuned to the leading GPUs in the market, not any specific chip. The good news is that these are all faster than the nVidia Tegra 2, which was probably the reference platform for most of the last year. The bad news is, any games that's really tuned to Galaxy SII performance would be slow on the NP, if we can believe the rumors (it would basically be about as fast CPU-wise as the SII, with a slower GPU pushing 2.4x as many pixels around).
With all that said, it'll beat the piss out of my OG Droid. And since you can't pick features from a Chinese menu and get the exact device you want, I'm betting that 720p AM-OLED makes up for a whole mess of other shortcomings, for my personal needs.