Nintendo didn't think it was worth it to port the emulators over to Wii U

I really wish Nintendo UPGRADED the Virtual Console mechanism, and not simply let the console run in "Wii mode". there's nothing stopping them from this, honestly. The Virtual Console does not require any kind of "Wii lockdown. It IS emulation, after all...

If this isn't the case, dare I say, It could be Nintendo's attempt to not eat into it's "console remakes on handhelds" market?

I am expecting they will eventually update the Wii U so that Virtual console games will run without having to drop into Wii mode.  "Eventually" is the key word though.  I would not be surprised by 6 months to a year.

I'm no expert on the matter, but my understanding is that emulators operate differently depending on the power and infrastructure of the sytem they're on. So directly porting the Wii's emulators to the Wii U can easily lead to the games being unplayable.

Since I know of no "perfect" emulator (the closest is the BSNES, which demands more power than the Wii had), each game must still be individually tweaked to get them into the state the Virtual Console provides. That takes a lot of time and manpower, for obvious reasons. The danger of not following this is shown by the Commodore 64 emulator on the Wii...

That said, there is nothing to physically stop them from doing so, and Iwata has stated they are looking into it. It'll be a while though...

I really don't care if I can't play VC in the gamepad, but what I want is the option to download again all my VC games for free while keeping them on Wii at the same time. There should be an account system that remembers the games I already bought so I don't have to pay again for them!

That's why I'm suggesting they don't take the easy way out and PORT emulators, rather remake them to work native to WiiU.

All Wii functionality is sandboxed into it's own closed system that for all things considered doesn't even know the Wii U exists. Think of a virtualized OS on a computer. It has no knowledge of the host OS and its functionality.

Nintendo does has a Wii U Virtual Console planned which will allow for GamePad use.

It could be possible that since the new Nintendo Network is user ID based rather than console based that any VC games you transferred over to the Wii U could be 'tagged' to one of the Wii U system users allowing them to either move the game over to the Wii U's VC game list or re-download the game with the GamePad functionality enabled.

We've already had 2 other threads debating this. Can we get them all merged?

That's what I hope so! Only problem is they haven't said anything about this, but if they allow this will be an instant buy for me :)

True they haven't.  But they haven't said anything about a lot of things.  It's been very poor communication on their part lately.

I expected to see the whole week filled with Nintendo Direct videos to flesh out more details about the system but it is not to be.

But we know there is a lot fo stuff they are working on that they haven't talked about so that does give hope that my statement in bold up there is one of them.

I know, and I'm saying that they're looking into it, but that doing so will mean once again tinkering and testing with the emulator for each and every game, which takes time and (more importantly) money.