Mario Kart Wii gave me the option to send friend requests to existing Wii friends, I guess that used the message board?Well some games did apparently require the use of the message board to friend etc. It was more common in the later games so you didn't have a unique friend code for each game (so I hear, haven't ran into one that used this system so far but then again I don't have many multiplayer Wii games at the moment). Anyway if true then that effectively hinders the multiplayer of said games. While this shutdown isn't earth shattering it is annoying and kind of premature considering that the Wii is still outselling the Wii U lol.
As for removing the channels, they are so small it really isn't worth it to remove them (someone here did and it freed up one or two blocks if I recall correctly). Just slide the the channels over two screens and you will likely never see them again. After all who has that many channels on the real nand? That brings up something I always thought was odd about the Wii. They gave you several pages for channels, yet with most games I have tried, after say four or five your wii memory is full lol. I never even had two screen fulls of channels due to the tiny Wii memory. Kind of ironic really.
It wasn't required to add friends though, so no big deal.'
The Forecast and News channels are about 90 blocks each IIRC (probably the globe graphics taking up space). Enough to install another game
I'm sure if you filled up your NAND with only NES VC games it would take a few pages.