Bricking didn't originate with iPhone jailbreaking and has been around for considerably longer. I can remember encountering the term for the first time while tinkering with a Linksys WRT-54g back in 2003 and it was already old by then.

Just because the iPhone can be bricked doesn't mean Apple invented the brick!

Third party 2Gb SD cards work fine already on the Wii. I have a San Disk Extreme II 2Gb card and it works fine - the only cards that don't work are SDHC cards (which Nintendo have never said they would support).

Regardless of how fast your SD card is the controller in the Wii is painfully slow. Hopefully what Nintendo means by "dramatically easier" copying is some firmware tweaks that improve the transfer rate to something half decent.