Kind of strange to see that from Joystiq. I would have expected that from Kotaku though, since they are owned by the same company that does Lifehacker and LH has had guides for Wii hacking before.
I've pretty much got this same setup on my Wii. Its not that hard to do. I dont have a dedicated HDD to put games on, though. I might think about that sometime. I mostly did it for homebrew stuff, emulators, and ripping games to play in the Wii emulator for PC (which is pretty sweet).