Also $2000 sounds doable if you got a nice game ready to be released. If you are uncertain you can produce something it is a lot. Also i believe nintendo ask for released 'commercial' projects before you can buy it. So even if you can afford it it may be hard to get. Is this $2000 only a license to be allowed to develop for the wii or do you get some nice tools also or only a cpp compiler with docs?

You always can go the 'homebrew' way with devkitpro. You cannot go commercial that way. And Nintendo does not aprove that way. Be aware that going beyond a rotating cube is going to be hard on the wii as its 3d api looks like opengl, but it is kind of different. My attempt to make it work like opengl without proper documentation: http://code.google.com/p/gl2gx/ . Yes i gave up.