Yes, exactly that. It has real good hardware. In some regards it overshadows both the SNES and Megadrive. The SuperGrafx has an additional VDC that overlays its output on the first VDC. This gives it another background layer and twice the amount of sprites per scanline and at all.The "successor" that only had five or so games and was quickly discontinued, while the console it was "succeeding" continued to get made?
The stock PC Engine can do 256 pixels of sprites per scanline. Sounds good enough, but the stock PC Engine can do just over 512 pixels of horizontal resolution, so you can only fill the screen with sprites when the lowest resolution is used. The SuperGrafx can fill even a 512 pixel screen with sprites. Or alternatively, you can just use one sprite layer as the 3rd background layer if dealing with 256 pixel wide video, which decisively beats the Megadrive's VDP.
The audio is still kinda trash tho, only a small step up from the NES, sounding pretty much like some early 80s Namco arcade games.