I wonder what would've happened if Nintendo had made it possible to log gameplay hours for Gamecube games on the Nintendo channel. As it is they have no way of knowing how many people play those games on Wii, making it the only console with no consumer data whatsoever (I'm counting VC for this).

I would realise quite how  many times that I have played through Zelda WW, that's what would happen.  I imagine it's quite a few times.

The only Gamecube games that interested me were Fire Emblem, Zelda, and Skies of Arcadia. Of those, only Skies of Arcadia do I ever care about replaying. 

For the most part, Gamecube was a dark spot on Nintendo's history that I would like to forget ever happened. 

I'm sure GC games will come to the Wii U's Virtual Console or market place at some point in the future. Nintendo LOVES milking their old games for all they're worth by constantly re-releasing them, and no doubt they Sony and M$ doin just that with their PS classics and Xbox originals.

Of course, I seriously doubt Nintendo would actually enhance their old GC games in any way like allowing for motion controls in a game like Super Mario Sunshine, or implementing online play for SSB Melee. I'd rebuy that game in a heartbeat if they did that, because Brawl was just a joke. But you know they won't do that since they'll be focused on making everyone buy Brawl 2.0 (aka Smash 4) on Wii U and 3DS, with even more obscure and unbalanced characters and the same shitty online play.

That's not so bad then if that's true.

Good point with the new controller, although the button configuration is a bit different.  We will have to wait and see on the rumors.  That still leaves out the memory card ports though.

Standard slot loaders are more common.  It is just going to be naturally cheaper.  (Economies of scale)

Why not do what I suggested in my last post?

Having an adapter for the discs, as well as one for the memory card in order to move over your saves to an sd card like this one Nintendo manufactured:

http://cube.ign.com/articles/400/400229p1.html

or better yet just emulate a GC memory card on Wii's internal memory/SD card like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRHJdM8AlhE&feature=related

Pick up and play a Gamecube for dirt cheap elsewhere. Nobody wants them, they'll plentiful.

That's got me thinking, why exactly did Nintendo not allow GC game files to be saved to the Wii's internal memory or an SD card? It seems like an obvious thing to do IMO.

Because the Wii implemented GC compatibility by operating in GC mode (underclocked hardware), where the hardware does not know about any of the new features such as internal memory or SD cards.

That would not be the case with the Wii U playing GC or Wii games, if it's true that the Wii U is using a recent GPU design (it wouldn't be able to operate in GC mode by simple underclocking, it would probably have to be emulated).