I'm going to sound like Sony Defense Force for a moment here, but as someone who builds computers, I can't shut up on this topic. It doesn't help that coworkers of mine thought the hard drive was only 8GB, until I explained that memory and drive space are different things.
Anyway, clock speeds say absolutely nothing about performance. It's instructions per clock that count, and 9 times out of 10, that info isn't openly published. That aside, I'd put money on the processor setting itself at 1.6GHz as a baseline during idle, but scaling performance up a bit as the game or app you're running demands, which is how most processors are set to run out of the box unless you manually set them to run full bore all the time. Judging from the basic info mentioned on the CPU so far, this thing is probably based on AMD's Trinity series of CPU+GPU processors, which means it hits reasonably close to lower end AMD and Intel chips, but without generating a shitload of heat or draining power like a sieve.
Take into account what it would do to the price for them to include something akin to Core i5-3570K (around $220) or FX-8320 (I paid $120 for mine), and the fact that higher power consumption and heat means a beefier power supply, capacitors with higher operating tolerances, etc, and this really is about the best compromise between price/performance we could possibly hope for.
This next gen is mostly going to come down to build quality, extra features, and exclusives, not who has a bigger dick.
