I for one am VERY happy with my Construct 2 game on Android (.APK) working at 56 to 60-fps at 1920x1200px (low-res scaling OFF).
My tablet is almost 1-year old, came out July 2013. The thing is that in 1-2 years time my current tablet will be the average or below average. So as game developers you need to look to the future, games like Asphalt 8 require reasonably heavy specs to run smoothly, but by being that game that everyone wants to be able to play one day, they stay at the top of the lists for years. Whenever someone upgrades their device the first thing they do is download the games they couldn't play before on their previous device.
Another thing, I grew up playing games on a Commodore Amiga 500 with only 7-Mhz and 512KB RAM.
Would it be appropriate for me to be releasing games for that system today? NO! So as game developers u need to be testing on better than average devices, becos by the time you've finished your game many months later the public has caught up and your device might be below average.
To help you choose which device to buy you need to look at benchmarks like: http://www.androidbenchmark.net/
And you need to take note of all the specs especially GPU chip model name and number, CPU, amount of RAM, etc... Type in any Phone into this website to see it's full specs + thousands of comments:
http://www.gsmarena.com/
Finally, look at Youtube videos of people actually playing hardcore games with the device you want, and also checkout website reviews eg. google search "phone model review"
Good luck! <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">