Ah, yeah totally forgot about starlet. It's been a while since I messed around in the Wii homebrew scene, but that was basically got me interested in cybersecurity in the first place when I was in middle school. I should go back and look at it now that I actually know what I'm doing (more or less).
The Wii itself was still a G3 PPC chip, just add a few hundred Mhz
It also had more RAM (which allowed the "Twiizers" attack over a decade ago)
All the Wii-centric functionality (USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, SD card, etc) was abstracted away inside an ARM co-processor inside the GPU. Named "Starlet" by the homebrew community
Wii software was then written that would simply poke at the API's it exposed to add that functionality