Think people are really really REALLY misjudging what the potential market for an iPad Junior would be. It's not going to be a powerhouse, it'll be the equivalent of the iPod Touch line with a focus on a good quality product at a relatively low price designed to tempt people away from the likes of the Fire and Nexus 7. While nothing is set in stone I'd fully expect the iPad Junior to be 1,024 x 768, A5 processor, relatively low storage (maybe even just the one spec) and come in right around the 5th gen iPod Touch price (though probably with half the memory). The iPad will be the equivalent of the iPhone and get the high end stuff first, in this case probably with a focus on creativity. Maybe next year the current low end iPad offering goes away and a higher capacity iPad Junior fits in instead, who knows.
As for the next iPad SoC (and sorry, this is trying to address a few comments at once) Apple are ultimately dependent on when silicon is available. The A6 seems to be an A15 variant that Apple got into production earlier than most people expected but the PowerVR 6 series isn't ready yet so it soldiers on with the current gen and that's fine for the smaller displays of the phone. The retina display on the iPad however, well we've already seen how much grunt is needed to run that with the A5X. I'd fully expect to see an A6X this time around but with a MUCH smaller and more efficient package matching up the existing A6 CPU cores (maybe at a higher clock) to at least a dual core 6 series GPU. If the performance figures on that are right it'd be a big jump forward while letting them get a much thinner and lighter device out the door.
