Problem is Wii games really aren't any longer than PS3 or 360 games. In most cases they're less feature intensive.

PS2/GC era graphics can die a nice lonely death, but that's just my opinion. I don't really even care about the poly counts, but the image quality is atrocious. These artists create great models and textures and its like taking a big pile of mud and smearing it over them to get them to run on the Wii/PS2. And on an HDTV set, which is what more and more people have? It can look terrible especially games that use a color pallete with a lot of brown or grey in them. 

On the higher def systems, the image quality is dramatically higher and you really can see the world create by the developer more or less as it was intended, instead of developers releasing those "bullshot" images so common place during the PS2/XBox/GC/Wii era of console ... basically saying "this is what we intended our game to look like". 

This is a slam dunk to Nintendo fanatics. I too remember the days when the Big N spoon feed me bullshit about optical disk consoles being a horrible idea- Only to breath a sigh of relief when they dumped the carts by the next gen.

And again history repeats itself. But the excuses and justifications only thinly veil the feeling that Nintendo missed the boat. Again.

There's nothing to slam dunk. Most Nintendo fans know the next system is going HD, so soundwave made a counterpoint to a false point.

I can't believe how silly this argument is ...

No company is dumb enough to choose a proprietary format which is so drastically different from existing formats that it requires independent research to see cost reductions at the same pace as an existing format. With that said, there is nothing that Sony (or the Blu-Ray consortium) can do to prevent Nintendo from taking “unlicensed Blu-Ray drives” from Panasonic, and having them play “unlicensed Blu-Ray discs” that have a slight variation (to prevent them from being read in a licensed Blu-Ray drive), as long as Nintendo doesn’t sell it as a Blu-Ray player.

These consortiums are, and always have been, paper-tigers which are (primarily) focused on covering the licensing costs of the underlying technology; and even the founding members of these consortiums do not (generally speaking) make much money from being in the consortium, and have very little power to prevent companies from licensing the format from them. The main reason companies (like Sony) try so hard to "control" a format is because they can ensure that their technology is chosen by the consortium and that they can generate revenue from every player manufactured and every disc sold; and (typically) this isn't that much money and is split up across dozens of contributors.

I'd more believe a rumor that Nintendo's next console is 4 GameCubes taped together rather then something like this.

Nintendo's main objection to optical discs was the long loading times and piracy protection, both legitimate concerns at the time.  They made a call that short loading times and copy protection were more going to be more important than the benefit of larger storage space. Were they wrong, in retrospect, probably yes.

They went to optical discs the following generation and what do you know they made that transition when they were confident that loading times were no longer such an issue (GC was great in this regard) and when the were fairly confident they had an optical format that was at least reasonably resistant to piracy (unlike CD).

Similarly, they claimed the move to HD was premature given HD TV penetration and development costs associated with HD game manufacture. Were they wrong?  I would argue that it depends very much on how you look at it.

Nintendo didn't have anything against opticals discs, or online or HD per se, rather they argued their profitability in that time space was questionable.  Now you can hate them for this stance but as has been pointed out again and again, gaming is their only business and they have to pay much closer attention to the bottom line than Sony has to. 

If Nintendo had put their R+D this generation into producing a powerful console on par with Sony and MS, rather than on motion control, and included Blu-Ray or similar such format, where would they be now and how many more development houses would have closed without the benefit of profits from Wii games?

Shiggy: Hey Iwata, dude, damn those basthices at Microshaft targeting our main market, wtf we gonna do dawg?
Iwata: Yeah man, those dicks at Sony too, god damn pricks ... why can't they gets their own mofoing ideas geeze ... *takes a deep drag of some hi-q weed*
Shiggy: *deep drag ... puff* Soerr, you down with the HD idea or you wanna HD HD those pricks and kick their mofoing ass?!
Iwata: I donno man *puff* ... probalby just HD, mofos are buying HD TVs all over the mofoing place, and wes don't want to alienate mofos that still use SD, uknowwhatimean?
Shiggy: yeaaa I kno tsk, shieet ... damn, this couch is the shit dawg, I an just lie here all day smoking this fine fine ...

Wii has a problem about piracy and Nintendo is really concerned about it

blu-ray would solve the problem, but i think 2010 is too soon for a system that is selling so good, it's a bit risky i think

but i wouldn't be surprised if these spec are real, especially blu-ray drive

Actually my point was that those Nintendo fans who decry HD today, will be riding that gravy train pretty soon once they get a look at major Nintendo I.P. up and running at HD resolution. 

I wouldn't say Nintendo "missed the boat" regarding the past though as they've pretty soundly kicked Sony and Microsoft's ass this generation. Now its more about what comes next, or maybe more specifically than "what" ... "when". 

I see your point there, but you're still mistaking HD games for just resolution. Again, that's just upscaling. It would be resolution AND increased polygons and textures. But the games still have to be good (because all those graphics wouldn't have saved Gears of War if it sucked).