Shifty: AA is pretty cheap, altho we ended up not using it, due to conflicts with the slow-down posteffect, and to be honest, i needed every little performance i could get for the more demanding levels. The ipad performance is very close, but its native res is much higher, so i definitely wouldnt expect anything cutting-edge at that res. Not that people care - most of them seem to be happy thinking IB2 is "retina"
gongo: yes, and geometry, and everything else
mobile gpus are much more... fragile, you really really have to consider all hardware peculiarities when writing your shaders.
Arwin: yeah, that game
it's not really a secret since its already been announced, i just didnt want people think im only here to advertise it
Textures were downscaled and some of them omitted, and yes, shaders had to be pared down quite a bit. In the end, seeing the end results, i think it was a good compromise - the small(er) screen kind of hides these cutbacks, and i totally agree with you that crispness and framerate are much more important for a handhend action game.