It might just be the fact that the spin-offs are designed to introduce new gamers into the series before putting the main titles out there. Give people a smattering of the good stuff.
Of course, a lot of development is graphic-centric, and thus they put their franchise out on the HD systems for that purpose. I will agree that there's a dramatic difference in polish just by going HD vs SD, I've recently done a side by side comparison with max setting for Quake 4 on a HD display and a SD VGA display. There's definitely a noticeable difference. Yet, the issue is, they spend so much time and budget on graphics, gameplay is often chopped up to shreds. Lair, anyone?
The risk becomes that while they are making HD games, the amount needed to be sold to break even is much higher. With the Wii reaching 50% marketshare, the difference between development for both HD systems OR the Wii will be non-existant. At that point, it would make sense for developers to push towards Wii development, as the dev costs are lower and they're reaching the same percentage of potential customers.
The only thing holding back some developers is the lack of a good, solid engine for the Wii that can be used for development, as many devs have to figure out how to tweak their games to fit within the Wii specs. With a proper engine that has boundaries defined, it wil become an easier and more openly accepted process.
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