After playing SMG and MP3 i can say that the wii graphics look better than the GC. I would even bet that they look better than the original xbox. They wont ever look as good as a ps3 or 360 but as long as they make great games like Zelda:TP i won't care. I would like better third party support though and online.

PS2 games ran in 420p, too.  The PS3 will also upscale PS2 games. 

 native resolution >>> upscaled one

Wow...Last time I looked at this thread there were two responses, and they both answered my question. Now that I've read all the other posts, I'm even more confused. I think the general consensus is "Wii has better graphics than anything from last-gen, but it has worse graphics from anything current-gen."

I feel really stupid because I haven't played SMG or MP3, so I haven't seen Wii graphics at their best.

Cool, SQRL is on the case. In the past I had to spend paragraph after paragraph taking down Windbane's inane anti-Wii trolling but looks like it's taken care of this time.

I will add a little bit to the discussion, it is possible for something to be both more powerful and similar to something else at the same time. Saying something is more powerful is a relative comparison between two things, saying something is similar is a relative comparison of the two and something else. So it is possible that say some benchmark is used on the Xbox, Wii, PS3, and 360. Just making up numbers let's say the Xbox had a 1,000, the Wii 1,250, the PS3 15,000, and the 360 14,000. Comparing just the Wii and the Xbox the Wii is somewhat more powerful. However comparing 1,000/1,250 to 14,000/15,000 they are also similar.

I have read, I think on IGN, that a few Gamecube games seem to have brighter colors when played on the Wii and also don't have as many frame rate issues. I've always guessed it had something to do with the Gamecube having 24MB of "faster" RAM and 16MB of "slower" RAM while when on the Wii I would guess the RAM is much closer in performance but that's just speculation on my part. I did try to test it with my GCN copy of Zelda TP and noticed there wasn't slowdown in a few situations but the conditions could have been slightly different.

How many PS2 games ran in 480p? I thought it was only a small fraction of them, but if I'm wrong please correct me.

The graphics are shockingly sh*t in most games, but the gameplays good on average. As it says underneath last gen I had all three consoles and played the N64 most