On a side note, there is probably some possibility that Nintendo could release (what I would call) an enhanced Wii; which, if you wanted to put it into terms of PC games, would be designed so a game could be released and play with low detail at 30fps@480p on a regular Wii while it could play at high detail at 60fps@1080p on the new Wii.
The (virtually impossible) challenge of this would be to get developers to treat both consoles as a single platform and consumers to accept this new platform; primarily because the capabilities of the Wii would determine what could be produced, and the main benefit of the new system would be a crisper, cleaner and smoother version of Wii games.
I want to be clear that I don’t expect this to happen, because there is a very large risk associated with behaviour like this. I do think this is a good generation for the console manufacturers to do a much more seem-less transition to new upgraded hardware rather than having a distinct generational transition; primarily because I don’t find the technical limitations of any of the systems to be bad, but I would like to see more stable performance from most games and a cleaner presentation from all consoles.
Now, I know there will be people who think that increasing the resolution and detail of Wii games without moving to advanced shader effects is pointless; but the only problems I have ever really had with Wii (or Gamecube) graphics are when games have aliasing and muddy textures because developers are lazy (most cases) or are pushing the system close to its limits (Resident Evil 4 would be the best example of this). If you eliminate these problems I don’t really see a need to upgrade the Wii at this point in time.
Edit: To a certain extent, a lot of what I'm suggesting could be handled with minimal effort on the developer's side of things. If Nintendo just created an openGL extension for texture filtering, and allowed developers to specify the texture filtering algorithm when loading a texture, and this filtering happened when a game was run at high resolutions you could get a lot cleaner of graphics at (almost) no cost.
