Oh this will be easy:
1. The Concept: while the concept is very good, it inheritly is putting more hardcore gamers out to rest on other systems for their needs. Despite that Nintendo is immensly successful for catering to a new crowd that has become very susceptable to Nintendo's marketing. Who can blame Nintendo, they did an excellent job with it however it has put many of out in the cold for the most part and exception of a few certain titles, some which are from Nintendo themselves.
2. Nintendo is being douchy to third party developers again. Instead of fostering excellent 3rd party support that desires great games made to really make the Wii shine, they have given an excuse to every crap developer a reason to make a game for cheap, sell it for cheap, and make a profit even though they don't deserve the revenue. Basically yes, the Wii has become a shovelware machine. Part of this is also a hardware issue which is next.
3. Hardware, where do I begin?????????????? (this will be long, just a forewarning). Perhaps the biggest surprise for the Wii in my view was not the controller, but the lack of substantially more powerful hardware. From reasonable assumptions, yes, the Wii is an overclocked Gamecube with much more RAM to fit the extra 50% increase in clock speeds on the GPU and CPU (the RAM system is very efficient and good for this level of hardware). Now Nintendo didn't have to go over the top like Sony or MS, but they could've done much better to give devs a much more powerful system as well as one consumers would actually want displaying on an HDTV. From the standpoint of backwards compatibility it's possible it could've been comprimised, but I think a more powerful PowerPC based processor that is in the Wii and the Gamecube back then could've been implemented easily, I imagine a PowerPC 4 chip, clocked around 2.0 GHz, substantially more powerful than what is suspected to be in the Wii (at least 4-5 times). As far as the GPU goes, I think an expansion on the Gamecubes chip would be necessary to preserve backwards compatibility without requiring two graphics processors. The original GC and the Wii's 50% higher clocked version are expected to have 4 Pixel pipelines with a texture unit on each, the TEV and of course fixed function transforming and lighting. Had I had my way, I'd have 12 or 16 total pixel pipelines, each with a texture unit, 4 TEVs as well as the extra polygon processing power as well as a 250 MHz instead of 243 MHz reported clock speed. The other big addition would be more embedded buffer eDRAM for larger texture buffer as well as more frame buffer eDRAM to make 720p support possible. As far as RAM, I'd keep the seperate pool system like there is but with 128 MB + 64 MB instead of the 64 MB + 24 MB on the Wii. Plenty of RAM for the hardware and it's needs. Internal storage would've been done with an HDD instead of flash memory, specifically one of those small 1-inch diameter drives like in large iPods, about 10 GB worth of space.
So basically my revised Wii specs:
CPU:
Power4/5 Architecture Central Processor @ 2.0 GHz
GPU:
Tri-Flipper GPU @ 250 MHz
Expected max polygon fillrate: ~150,000,000 triangles raw
12 Pixel Pipelines x 250 MHz = 3000 MegaPixels/Sec raw
12 Texture Units x 250 MHz = 3000 MegaTexels/Sec raw
6 MB eDRAM frame buffer
480p, 720p output (16:9 widescreen) support via components
Full multi-texturing support just like GC and real Wii, with built in normal mapping, parallax mapping. Revised instruction set for these features.
DSP:
Built into graphics package a la real life. Supports 64 seperate sounds at once via high quality 2.0 Stereo
RAM:
64 MB 1T-SRAM built into GPU (just like Flipper and Broadway GPUs). 128 MB External RAM clocked at 500 MHz effective speed.
HDD:
10 GB inch drive
Gamecube controller and memory card support, yadda yadda yadda. Basically this represents a system at least 5 times as powerful as the Gamecube (probably around 3 times as powerful as the Wii, at least), would've supported 720p natively and would be using many of the same graphics techniques, physics, etc that you see on the 360 and PS3, just to not as high an extent, but still very useful never the less, and plenty of headroom to do some crazy things. Basically I aimed for specs that would play PC games like FEAR and Far Cry as well as Battlefield 2 with relative ease with good graphics but without going overboard on specs as that adds to the cost of the machine. I seriously think this level of machine would've been easy to do within a $250 per machine pricetag (the Wii costs $142 to make, the rest is actual profit). Plus better specs would deter shovelware as better titles would make full use of this hardware quite nicely, giving shovelware users no excuse to make crap.
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