Tell ya one thing, apparently the director (well the team in fact) is the Ridge Racer folks, and IIRC, Namco told the director to make a RR for Wii, and instead he was like "nah, I want to do something different".
Even in light of the results, that still makes me sad that we were so close to a Ridge Racer for Wii. :'(
Funny seeing this thread bumped. Back in the day before I was too active on GAF, I made the OT for this game on another forum. The responses were pretty similar to those here, namely "this looks more fun than it should"
I remember BN saying they wanted to do a sequel on Wii U and the game did really well IIRC on Wii in Japan. Not to mention they are actually willing to make Wii U exclusives (Taiko) so I don't know what they're waiting for!
One could really make a decent list of overlooked games that deserve to be tweaked and re released in HD on Wii U.
Go Vacation, Zack & Wiki, Pandora's Tower, Zangeki no Reginleiv, Elebits, etc..
Maybe it'll happen on Nintendo's next console..