The Wii owes a lot to the successes of the previous generation. Several of the top rated Wii games were ported from GC or PS2: Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime Trilogy, Resident Evil 4, Okami, and Super Paper Mario to name a few. Of course, Wii remote functionality was tacked onto those titles to make them a better fit to the system.
I like the Wii but it's clear that the early naysayers who called the hardware "Gamecube 1.5" were fairly accurate in this statement. That should have actually worked to the advantage of 3rd parties since many of them already had experience programming for GC. It makes the fact that they have not developed more AAA titles for Wii even more bewildering. Hopefully we'll see more top tier third party titles. Thankfully, Nintendo's exclusives make the system worth owning.
Edit: First party exclusives, that is.
