Pretty straightforward.  I think so.

I doubt it - more likely to come in the ninth generation.

Its unlikely to happen until the drives have become standard in PCs and as such much much cheaper than they currently are. The consoles have only even had harddrives for the past two generations and only really started making proper use of them this generation.

Don't think so, I see SSD more as a portable storage media because it's very resistant.

There are new techniques that allow HDD to have much more storage capacities and to be capable of reaching high speed data transfer. The cost will be a lot less than SSD for the foreseeable future.

@lightbleeder. Not really. To be honest the cost of something without moving parts should quickly drop below the cost of something with moving parts. I think SSDs of some sort are definitely going to replace HDD in most computers (of all sorts) within about a decade.

@Rath. Yeah you may be right, let's hope the costs of SSDs go down soon. It's faster and consumes a lot less power so it's good for the environment.

I don't know ...

I expect Sony and Microsoft will (probably) continue to push the multimedia functionality of their console, and with their increased focus on Digital Downloads they will probably want a (much) larger hard-drive. If Sony and Microsoft want a 1TB or 2TB drive in their next console it is unlikely that it would be a solid state drive.

In contrast, I expect Nintendo will want to dramatically increase the storage capacity of their system but they will also want to keep cost down. As a result of this, I wouldn't be that surprised to see the next Wii include 32GB to 128GB of flash memory on board with a couple of ports to expand this memory.

I don't think that anyone will be opposed to using solid state drives but I think that they aren't really inexpensive enough, or have high enough capacity, to really suit the needs of the console manufacturers.

@HS. Currently too expensive for Nintendo to do that. I believe the cost of solid state memory is approximately 20 times as much as normal hard drives.

Hence the generation after next, in ~8 years time that will have fallen a lot.

This gives an idea of the prices.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=636&Category=15&name=Solid-State-Disks

Solid state drives are expensive, but in 3 to 4 years a 32GB flash card will cost less than $10 at retail.