Lack of voicechat is appalling. It eliminates any potential for team-based games. Wiiware and VC is hardly great compared to Live and PSN.

Ah, best not to bring "quality" up. That's rather one of those "eye of the beholder" matters. And again, it's not like most of the Wii user base even knows that an alternative exists. As for Virtual Console's current dwindling of content, that's not exactly damaging their existing library. Unless you're the sort of person who absolutely must have a new game released every week which caters to your needs (which makes me wonder how such a person would ever find the time to play so many games), Virtual Console is more than sufficient.

As far as online systems go, friend codes suck, but why do people ignore all the stuff that you can do?

Brawl offers 4 player stock, time, and team battles with all stages available for online play. It lets you have up to 3 people on one console play online. It has co-op home run contest and multi-man brawl.  It has all items and rules available from multiplayer modes.  It lets you spectate random matches, record and send matches to friends, send screenshots (with a great screenshot tool btw), and it lets you create and send custom levels.

Mario Kart lets you create custom grand prixs, play 12 players online (with up to 4 playing locally), play by worldwide, regional, or against friends, online regional and worldwide rankings, downloadable ghost data from friends and worldwide, official Nintendo tournaments, and lets you check when friends are online and jump right into a race with them from the Wii menu.

Yes, it's missing voice chat and friend codes still suck, but it's hardly barren and featureless.  

Quality is completely a matter of opinion, but according to IGN the combination of WiiWare and Virtual Console slaughter PSN and XBLA in quantity of quality releases.

Obviously you are welcome to have a differing opinion on the subject, but to pretend your opinion is worth anymore than theirs is is a joke. So don't talk about quality like you are some infallible overlord ruling over what's good and bad.

Mario Kart online is good from what I've played, minus the voicechat. Not having FFA battle mode and 2-player (or more) grand prix isn't good, though, but that's not an online problem...

But the last time I tried Brawl it took far too long for each match to start. You end up waiting more than playing. Maybe it's gotten better?

Friend codes and voice chat kind kill the overall experience, though...it's annoying just to add friends and you can't talk to them.

Who from IGN? The Nintendo team? What is that based on, the few decent Wiiware games so far? Yeah, it's a matter of opinion, but most people would rather have new games and demos than old games, and Wiiware is mostly potential right now. Not to mention all the outlying features that have already been mentioned. I don't see how anyone that is not a fanboy can honestly claim that Nintendo's online service is better than either PSN or Live right now.

I've never actually played Brawl in random play. Seemed pointless to me. Friends are the whole point of Smash.

As far as missing features, a lot of things kill the online experience on consoles for me.

For example: Despite the presence of voice chat, I inevitably mute everyone on consoles. Most of the people who talk are racist 14 year old boys with cracking voices. This isn't an issue on PC, but I never use voice chat on consoles because the average online gamer is immature and annoying.

The consoles are also missing a lot of features PCs have. Voice chat outside of games, launching games from chat windows, launching games without changing discs, joining a game and server straight from the buddy menu (Mario Kart did actually add this), pre-downloading and installing games before they launch so that on launch day they just become unlocked, buying games from your friend's my games list directly, personalized media center of favorite demos, videos, and trailers, full downloadable games (Warhawk getting near this), and mods and mod tools that are directly accessed from my service.

Obviously some of those things can't be imlpemented without real digital distribution services, but it's not like consoles aren't still lacking a lot of services that PCs have.  If I held everything to PC standards, I wouldn't ever have fun on consoles.  I tolerate console shortcommings, just as you do, to play my games.  Yeah, there are a couple more things missing from Wii's than the others, but all of them are missing a lot more than that...

Yeah, PSN is putting some HORRIBLE games on the service.

@ your comment about Wiiware + VC > PSN, XBL

It's kinda cheap though, since Microsoft, and Sony to a lesser extent have much smaller catalogs than that of Nintendo (VC).  Comparing Wii Ware itself to PSN games (Excluding PS1 downloads) and XBL yields much different results, but that also isn't fair.  WW is fairly new, while PSN and XBL are not.  

Erm you can play a two player (or up to 12 online) Grand Prix with friends. locally (not online) there are many more options, you can play a 1-4 player GP on 2-32 tracks with or without computer players, norm/hard/easy or no items at all. The options are endless. battle wise the odd oversight doesn't make much difference online bescause it still scores you according to how many hits/coins you made, not your team.... it is annoying when playing friends only and there are only 3 of you (because that means 2 vs. 1). --- I don't have brawl so no comment.

I looked at the current list of games and said hell no..I'm not wasting money on none of those games...lol

I will how ever buy the Final Fantasy game that is on WiiWare :D