It's probably been suggested somewhere in this monster of a topic (practically a new page every time I refresh the damn thing), but all this talk about a touch screen for a console makes a lot of sense to me as the most recent way for Nintendo to bridge their non-gamer efforts of the Wii into more traditional styles of play.
A large part of why the Wii worked to begin with was their thinking that nongamers were scared off by obtuse button layouts and complicated designs, and this would do away with a lot of those problems in a couple of ways. For one, a screen-controller would be fully customizable, meaning that you could generate as many or as few buttons as are needed to control the game. The control layout could shift as needed depending on what's going on in real time.
Maybe simpler in idea but more important in impact, is that screen-buttons would effectively eliminate one of the current barriers of assigning game actions to arbitrary buttons. You don't have to worry about trying to teach people controls in the sense of "press A to jump," then watch the person try and fish out where the A-button is...you'd just have a literal "Jump" button right on the controller. Demo kiosks often have card printouts that tell you button assignments, this would be like having that as an integrated part of the controller itself. You would never not know how to control a game, the only adjustment is figuring out how that action works within the context of the game world. It's a simple but nonetheless exciting proposition.
