This is cool! Now if Nintendo would only let me run content of the damn SD card so I wouldn't have to move out 2/3 of my virtual console games to download these things. Only the top-end WiiWare titles will be worth my time until they let me do this. It takes so long to delete each individual title from the Wii and so much longer to copy them back again.

It's not really Nintendo's fault there. SD cards aren't designed for that.

Then they need to come up with an easy high-speed memory expansion for the Wii. 512MB isn't enough considering the size of WiiWare and Virtual Console games. With the way they've engineered things, they're turning off a lot of potential customers, myself included.

There was a comment recently somewhere that hinted that a solution may be forth-coming. I'd be willing to buy a hard-drive add-on, for one, provided it wasn't way too damn expensive. Considering the kinds of things to be found on the Wii, it could be a pretty small hard-drive for a cheap price. 20 gigs would probably be way more than enough, and they could sell the thing for like $20 and still make a profit. The Wii has USB ports, so it's all ready to go.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl lets you run levels directly off the SD card. The Wii should at the very least let you save your game directly to the card, and maybe even run the older games such as NES stuff off the card.

I've not checked, but I assume Wii Ware titles are like the other games, once you buy them, you can delete and redownload them until you hearts content?

1. Yes, much like the VC games, you can buy, delete, and redownload as you please (assuming you have a Nintendo.com profile attached to your Wii, that is).
2. Wii Ware is not a channel in and of itself, but a sub-channel of the Wii Shop Channel. Therefore, yes, you can Gift Wii Ware games.
3. Virtual console is to emulated games for previous systems as Wii Ware is to original games designed specifically for the Wii.

EDIT: Okay, I bit and downloaded LostWinds as well, I'm about to try it now, I'll post in a bit with my thoughts.

UPDATE: Yeah, no regrets at all with this purchase. The controls are very smooth, the graphics, in my opinion, are very nice, and the music in the game is great so far. One thing I'm a little surprised about is how calming the game is, mainly because of the music which has a kind of new age/Native Aerican feel to it.

That's not really an excuse, though -- they put the SD card slot there, and in doing so created the expectation that we'd be able to do useful things with it, and it was only a matter of time before people started to exhaust the internal flash and then look to the SD slot as a solution. The problem with SD isn't performance (high-end SD cards are pretty damn quick these days), but with the encryption Nintendo puts on game data stored on SD. The decryption involved in streaming data off the SD card in real-time would chew through a good chunk of the Wii's CPU power.

Having said that, emulating cart-based systems all but requires the ROM to be loaded in to RAM, and the Wii has plenty of that for the emulator code and even 256Mbit N64 ROMs, so I can't see why they couldn't make VC titles playable from SD, even if it the decryption does add to load times.