Overclocking is not guaranteed, and the Radeon HD 7850 which the 650 Ti may be going up against is one of the best overclockers currently. The bandwidth on the 650 Ti is going to be terrible at stock speeds, and overclocking wouldn't really give it an advantage.
Way back when the Radeon HD 5770 was released, its 128 bit memory bus width was already bottlenecking it in games. 80+ GB/s is not a "massive improvement"; extra shader power just means that the 650 Ti is going to hit those bottlenecks even harder. I'm interested to see the benchmarks where the 7770 beats the 6790/5830 "in most games".
The GTX 660 has a memory clock of about 6000 MHz, while the 650 Ti is going to have a memory clock of 5400 MHz. As bandwidth is certainly going to be the limiting factor on this card, one would think that Nvidia would push the memory clock speed higher if there was consistent headroom for it. Judging by the size of the PCB I wouldn't put too much faith in it for OCability.
compare the 5770 to the 6790, there is hardly a huge difference in performance, for a much higher bandwidth,
GT 640 bandwidth is only 28GBps... that's a massive difference, sure the extra ALUs and TMUs and all of that will need more bandwidth, but it's a more acceptable level,
something with significant impact might also be 16 ROPs only (just like a 7770), but still... GTX 650 TI will have 64TMUs, the 7770 only have 40... I would agree that some of this advantage will probably be limited by other aspects (like bandwidth), but I would still expect a big advantage in many cases.
about 7770 (72GB/s) vs 6790 (134GB/s)
7770 wins in most games
http://ht4u.net/reviews/2012/msi_geforce_gtx_650_power_edition_test/index40.php?dummy=&advancedFilter=false&prod%5B%5D=AMD+Radeon+HD+6790&prod%5B%5D=AMD+Radeon+HD+7770&filter%5B0%5D%5B%5D=1680&filter%5B0%5D%5B%5D=1920&filter%5B0%5D%5B%5D=2560&filter%5B2%5D%5B%5D=1&filter%5B2%5D%5B%5D=2x2+SSAA&filter%5B2%5D%5B%5D=2x2+SSAA+%2B+MLAA&filter%5B2%5D%5B%5D=4&filter%5B2%5D%5B%5D=8&filter%5B2%5D%5B%5D=FXAA+-+hoch&filter%5B2%5D%5B%5D=MLAA&filter%5B2%5D%5B%5D=Post+AA&filter%5B3%5D%5B%5D=16&aa=all
as for the 5770, the 7770 proves that the 5770 is a lot more limited by other aspects than by memory bus/bandwidth.
Good news. Looks like the leaked 576 CUDA core specs were wrong.
forget about Dragon Age 2 from this test, because there is clearly something going wrong (probably driver related);
I understand how you are using the 640 as an example, but I disagree that anything similar to that can happen, simply because at 28GB/s is just to little, but at 86 there is a lot more "room", the GTX 650 (GT 640 with DDR5) clearly have more memory bandwidth than needed (80GB/s), the 650 Ti will be somewhat limited, but not nearly as much as the 640 imho (it's basically 2x the GT 640 GPU but with 3x the memory bandwidth),
even though bandwidth is closer to the 7770 I expect the 650 Ti to be a closer to the 7850 than the 7770 in many cases.
about the 6790 vs 6770 you can't forget that the 6790 was significantly faster in some cases (like tessellation) since it's basically a 6800, when the 6770 is a 5770, but again the 7770 is clearly faster than the 5770 with lower memory bandwidth, I don't see why the 650 Ti can't be a good amount faster, it already have 15% higher memory bandwidth and in other aspects a lot more.
let's wait and see.
I disagree that the 650 Ti will be closer to the 7850 than the 7770. It'll be much like the situation with the 660 Ti, only worse. The 660 Ti has the same core count and clock speed as the 670. The 670 general beats or ties the Radeon HD 7950 at stock speeds. Chop out a portion of the memory bandwidth from the 670 to make the 660 Ti, and some of those advantages disappear. What's more, the 7870 is competitive with the 660 Ti in a fair amount of games, even beating it sometimes. With the 650 Ti, they're both cutting the core count down from the 660 GTX and lobotomizing the memory bandwidth to an even greater extent than between the 670 and 660 Ti. We've got a repeat of the situation with the 660 Ti or worse, calling it now.
As for the 6790 -- the 7770 has better tessellation than both the 5770 and 6790. Stepping up from the 5770 to a 6790 in comparison to the 7770 should not be enough change the winner if the deciding factor is tessellation. Memory bandwidth has to be the source of the issue. Don't get me wrong, the 650 Ti is going to be faster in games that aren't memory constrained, but in games that are it's going to hit a wall and hit it hard.