I like software.

I would like to see some GC downloadable service now. Most GC games aren't big(1 gb or 2) and I'm sure it can be compressed even smaller. If you have a larger sd card like an 8,16,32gb that is tons of GC games that you could keep on the Wii. The only thing that I could see being a problem is the length of the download for the mainstream who don't want to wait dozens of minutes to hours depending on their download speeds.

Edit: I forgot about the requirement of having as much space available on the actually flash memory. Maybe some games? There are a couple that are or could be smaller than 512mbs.

How many games can a $4 2g sd card hold?

Probably all of the games on the virtual console+wiiware as of now and still alot of space left. I don't feel like doing actually calculations, but my estimate is probably close.

let's see. this isn't exact, but a 2gb card has about 18,000 blocks on it, so you could store about...

-60 300 block games(the larger games, like world of goo, paper mario, sin and punishment, ect.)
or
-90 200 block games(some n64 games
or
-180 100 block games(some n64 games)
or
360 50 block game(snes games)

nes games are even smaller than 50 blocks, but you can only have 240 files on the sd card (well, ir'll only detect 240 different channels on a card), so not all those 50 bloack games would fit anyway.

if you EVER get 240 channels on a card, you can just use the rest of the space for game dlc, savegame backup, pictures, ect)

EDIT: i did some more fuzzy math, and i think even if you bought 240 of the largest possible size games, (i think it's 320 blocks, but i'm not certain) you could conferably fit them on a 16gb card or the majority of them on a 8gb card (all those games would take up about 8.5 gigs of space, so it would just barely be too much for an 8gig).

So, what are the odds that Nintendo might leave out SD functionality on their next console? I think pretty high so they could profit from everyone having to buy these games again.

Pretty low, but then I doubt that when the Wii's successor arrives, everyone will suddenly lose the ability to play all those games on their Wii. Sorry to piss on your cynicism.

I dunno. Are Sony and MS gonna drop HDD functionality so that people buy PSN and XBLA downloadable games again?