Nintendo hasn't offered the most powerful console for the past two generations. Nintendo failed utterly on the format front, and that means any advantages within the architecture were more then wiped out. Nintendo prefered to maintain a proprietary mindset. They not only wanted to own the console, but they wanted both the licensing, and to own the manufacturing rights to the media. The Wii itself still uses a Nintendo proprietary format.
Which begs the question whether Nintendo is going to languish next generation at least in comparison to Sony which will probably still use a BluRay player. Not to metion Microsoft which may move up if not to the BluRay then one of the lesser competitors. There being a number of disc formats now that provide many times the storage of a DVD. That is also just plain ignoring the increasing size of hard drives which may allow for massive downloads.I am having reservations that Nintendo will not opt for a serious move towards large internal storage unless they can create such a system themselves.
Format is essential to being the best, and it has everything to do with the needs of developers. This caused developers to scale back games, or just to pass by on porting to the previous two generations of Nintendo consoles. The Wii just basically uses a scaled up GC drive, and is making the grade now. That said it still took Nintendo too long to get to this point, and if they can't make the investment to take the media higher we could very well see Nintendo repeating the same mistake all over again.
