"Same requirements", in this case, means "no additional requirements". We've gotten kind of used to having each successive release of Windows ask for greater and greater hardware requirements over the years -- Win2K needed more than Win98, XP needed more than Win2K, Vista would struggle on a machine that was very happy with XP, etc.
Win7 broke the cycle, and actually required less of the hardware than Vista did unless it was forced to work in XP-compatible mode (Vista loaded both the Aero environment and the backwards-compatible environment by default). Win8 is similar -- as long as you stay in the Metro environment (tile-based apps, the stripped-down browser, etc.), you can get away with even less than you can with Win7. That's how Win8 will be able to run on mobile devices easily -- even a slow, low-voltage Atom or ARM processor with relatively slow RAM and a smallish amount of Flash should have little trouble running Metro apps (and your mainstream desktop/laptop should absolutely scream through them -- keep in mind that the current evaluation release is packed to the gunwales with debug code and asserts). Once you punch through the Metro interface and into the traditional desktop, then you're essentially in the Win7 environment, so the hardware requirements will be essentially the same as they were for Win7.
As for giving Win7 a miss, well, there's no good technical reason to do so if your graphics card will run Aero. It's not the nightmare that Vista was. The only reason that most of my machines are still on XP is, well, because I'm an old dog who has trouble with new tricks, and I've got XP set up to look and act like a "better Win2K" (which looked and acted like a "better Win98"). Eventually I'll have to get used to the newer UIs. I don't hate them -- I'm just not nearly as quick with them, mostly because I've been using pretty much the same UI for more than 15 years (since Win95 was released). I use Win7 on a netbook (upgraded to Home Premium from Starter), and it ain't so bad -- even given that the netbook has only 1GB of RAM, a crippled processor (single core 800MHz, no FPU, next to no cache) and a hopelessly slow disk subsystem. The tradeoff is that for the slowness, I get a solid ten hours of battery life and a machine that weighs well under 1kg and takes up next to no room.
