Don't forget uncompressed audio, Squill.  On a flash based physical medium, you can stream uncompressed 7.1 audio quite nicely.

Could also allow for less texture compression until processes like procedural texturing and ray tracing become more accessible.

Though I agree that we won't likely see a huge jump in the need for capacity over 20 to 30 GB.

Very much expected.  Going back to solid state media would be nice.

The inevitability is a Nintendo-branded Blu-Ray ripoff, i say.

i doubt that it will be called the wii2 considering that nintendo does really make successors to there consoles I.E gamecube to wii. here what i want from nintendo's next console. Im not a big graphics person but i would like the see them step it up in that area. also i would like them to retire the wiimote for a more conventional controller. the mii's should have more customization options. Hd and dvd playback.

You can already buy a 16G class10 SDHC cards for $30 nowadays.

They can probably save some RAM by using the data directly from the memory card and leave it to do intensive processing.

$23 actually.  And who knows how much profit margin is padded into that price.

One disadvantage of using physical media is that you use up a very large amount of space when it comes to the size of a console.  Apple clearly is looking in that direction as well being that portability in size is very important for them.  They ditched the Disk drive for their Mac Book Airs.  It may be a sign of things to come for their other doodads.

Nintendo has always tried to have their consoles be small and mobile.  Gamecube had a handle for transportation and was very light.  And Wii is a tiny baby as well.  Also, how will Wii compete if their competitors go digital?  They'll be able to charge much less.

One important thing people are forgetting.

solid state flash or whatever you want to call it will HOPEFULLY mean no installs to hdd . I Bet EA and ACTIVISION given the opprotunity would still install stuff to hdd. 

But as a few devs have said bugs are part of games now so fixes are quicker to do. How will these impact on everything?

I knwo you cna read and write to solid state memory but would NIntendo allow that for fixes to be installed that way?

I so want to see solid state memory used, I hate discs. It is hard buying second hand games when they are covered in scratches liek they currently are on discs.

Nintendo would simply allocate some internal membery for patches like they do for Wii.  A simple boot time patch check would ensure the game knows the patch is on the console prior to fully booting the game and the patch will run in either tangent or from RAM while the game is played.

Well yes I thought about that. But compare it to 360/PS3. They have huge patches and updates now. and LOTS of them. I would love to see updatable space on the solid state memory for that kind of stuff. WIth the option to reset to factory default (so all patches etc will get deleted). That would be cool.