Well I called Nintendo, and the support guy must have been uninformed, he told me to send my Wii U in for repairs, he didn't say if it would cost me anything though, and I really don't wanna be without it for like 2 weeks... so I HOPE the update is true and it's coming. And is there anyway to turn these off without yanking the plug? I guess I could have waited a bit holding the power button but I was being inpatient because I heard sometimes if you let a system sit in a lock up it can actually hurt it more, don't know how true that is.

I was notified it's best to unplug it ASAP if it locks up, that it's the best way to deal with it. This is a widespread problem, I am certain an update should come sometime next week. I'd say this is a mild problem for a launch system, at least it's no RROD.

I read on another forum that it is believed the cause of the crashing is down to miiverse. Something to do with text characters maybe from other languages or something along those lines

I haven't had a single issue so far, but i have seen a lot of complaints. Guess I'm just lucky.

How often do you play and what game do you play mostly? I noticed some games like Nintendo Land seem to like to lock up more than others.

Nintendo land does freeze up some... I hope nintendo sends a wii u firmware update...

It just happened to me for the first time too. Maybe it's memory overload from all the Miis running around in the plaza?

What I know about the freezing/locking up. First of all it is definitely a problem. Second of all it is nothing to worry about, your Wii U will NOT die, worst case scenario a save file gets corrupted. While playing NFS Most Wanted U it froze up a lot for me. I changed the Miiverse language to English only and this helped a LOT. I also think that manually entering your router info into the WiFi settings will remove the cause of the other freezes and the cause of the Wii U disconnecting from the internet randomly. I have not tried the last fix yet.

It hardlocked three times for me in Assassins Creed III and one time in Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed.
Still less then the times games hardlocked for me on PS360 (yet)