| Entroper said: There is nothing in your quote suggesting that a firmware update will give the Wii DVD playback or high-resolution output (greater than 480p). In fact he suggests that including those features would have increased the production costs of the Wii, implying that it does not have these capabilities in the hardware. |
Actually this is not quite right. I quote the USA today article:
Tough choices about not including a DVD player at the start, tough choices about not including high-definition capability at the start.
And "at the start" clearly impliest that these functions can be software enabled and do not require hardware addons. Besides the USB bus there's no possibility to add any hardware to the wii, and I can't imagine an USB HD-extension - not to speak of another USB DVD drive for DVD playback 
