I still don't get why you're arguing that Apple will always treat the iPad Mini as a second-tier product. Isn't it more probable that the Mini got crappy specs because a) development likely started a while ago, when iPad 2 was the flagship and b) it was developed in secret by a separate team so that the full-size iPad was on a different schedule and got all the goodies while the Mini was essentially a previous-generation device when it was released? A similar thing happened with the very first iPad, which was basically an iPhone 3GS and which even had its own special iOS version - the teams working on the iPad and the iPhone 4 likely didn't know anything about each other.
Now that the Mini has come into its own as a product I think Apple will give it some love, i. e. at the very least current-gen SOCs and ideally a retina display. Again, it doesn't make sense to artificially cripple a product which is already successful, but probably has even more potential. I'm not sure consumers don't care about these things, neither I nor anyone I know (non-techies for the most part) are interested in the Mini until it gets a retina display, for example. That's not some kind or arcane spec only nerds care about, even my dad can immediately perceive the difference between retina and non-retina.