Nintendo Doesn’t Think Your Wii U Will Collect Dust~ Reggie also thinks that the Wii had plenty of games the last couple of years, even makes jokes about it!

[Viper1]

Spazzy_D said:
"No Virtual Console or Wii games on your GamePad either. Wii channels and games will be accessible on your big screen, in SD. "Think of this as having a Wii inside our new console," Fils-Aime said."

......

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Come on, Wii I can understand (but am upset with, would love to play Xenoblade on my tablet controller in bed), but no virtual console? Really?

This might get changed in a later firmware update but I cn understand why this won't be there day 1.

The GamePad is streamed a resolution of 854 x 480 which is not a standard resolution for the Wii emulation system used to render the VC games and the Wii U will use the same emulator system.  Thsi would require the emulator to be reworked to output that resolution for all the various consoles it emulates (NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, Neo-Geo, etc....) and new code to inform the system that the output needs to be piped out of the Wii render pipeline into the Wii U pipeline and then on to the GamePad.

But, as I noted, this can be fixed at a later point.  And I hope it is.