Sega must have seen the stories, which traced back to someone seeing a folder labelled "The Conduit" on the FTP site Sega uses to distribute assets to the media and said "oh, hey, I guess we should announce that." Because they totally announced that this morning.
The Conduit will ship to stores in Spring of 2009 and should be a technical tour-de-force of sorts for the Wii, as it will support both the upcoming Wii Speak online talkin' peripheral, as well as Wii MotionPlus for one-to-one wagglin'.