Component cables aren't bad you know , you can get 1080p out of them and they are only one small step away from VGA quality. I used a xbox with a component cable to a projector and was pleased with the image. Many xbox owners do a internal VGA conversion as well to up the quality even more.
I don't know your insight on the wii but I remember reading an article about developing for the wii and it said the 16MB of slow memory of the Gamecube was replaced with 64MB DDR memory and mapped the same serving the same purpose. The slow access times of the larger DVD disc which could be up to about 6x larger in capacity and for some games dual layer required a much larger cache to reduce or eliminate loading times. The wii had lightning fast data transfer between the 24MB, 2MB and 1MB but much slower access to the 64MB memory. I'm sure developers would have worked out techniques to optimise it's use though and make good use of it.
