Funny you should mention that! Some members of the BitBuilt community are working on this including the talented YveltalGriffin https://bitbuilt.net/forums/index.php?threads/nintendo-vegas...

Is this seen as any less of a "Wii" than a trimmed board? What if parts were replaced with newer, functionally identical ones?

This is kind of a Wii ship of Theseus.

As a longtime observer of the scene, no. Creating the smallest board possible while maintaining original game compatibility are about the only metrics to stick to. Usually this boils down to keeping the CPU, GPU, NAND (if exists like the Wii), and most times the RAM.

There are some nuts people out there like Redherring32 with his TinyTendo project that go above and beyond just putting the components on a new board. He designed the TinyTendo which requires cutting down the DIP-packaged CPU and PPU from the NES into a smaller package. These components were only produced for Nintendo systems of the era and are the special sauce for overall game compatiblity. https://github.com/Redherring32/TinyTendo

Ship of Wiiseus

How does a typical smartphone SoC compare to the Wii in terms of processing power? Would one of those running an emulator be even smaller?

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the Wii's CPU was 32-bit, 729 MHz, and single-core, and its GPU was a 243 MHz SoC. I briefly checked the Samsung Galaxy S lineup as a point of comparison, and it seems like the second one (from 2011) already smoked those specs. As for space, even without doing any modifications to the phone it's already about half the volume of this mini-Wii.

Of course that's really just sidestepping the challenge of "how small can you get an actual Wii".

You could 100% make a smaller fake "wii" by emulating it with a smartphone SoC. Mid-range phones can emulate Wii and Gamecube at 2x resolution.

However, the intention of these miniature builds is to preserve the original device, just in tiny form. No emulation involved. As if it was an official product.

Well, the Wii GPU has 12 GFLOPS, while the Mali-G52 MP2 used in the Galaxy A14, the top selling Android phone of 2023, has 418.78 GFLOPS.

People have been running Dolphin on Nvidia Shields since the first one came out in 2015

People already do the strange things, like VSA100 monsters:

https://www.zxc64.com/vsa100_based/0_62911_strange_god_agp_2...