As it happens sick people who should be in hospital not infrequently turn up to the GP clinic, and having that acute medicine experience becomes all the more relevant when the nearest hospital is 2 hours away.
While I don't know a great deal about the general state of play re. this topic in NZ, I do think the above hits the nail on the head of one really significant point. Separate training paths for city and rural docs surely just serves to widen the already (at least in Aus, and I presume similar in NZ) huge service gap that exists between the two (or more if we start to add in 'remote' regions) areas. And that is a very slippery slope with an ultimate message that I believe says 'your health is not as important to us as the health of those in the cities', therefore your doctors won't be as broadly trained or as widely experienced. And while I acknowledge funding and population distribution is a really big issue (and is only going to get bigger), I wholeheartedly don't believe pushing something 'lesser' (which is what I feel this Waikato proposal amounts to, no matter how many fancy words are used to suggest otherwise) is an appropriate way to deal with it.
And obviously this doesn't touch upon the other issues already mentioned, such as graduates having to work in hospitals, and/or not taking up positions as rural GPs in the end, anyway. Though, given the training path crushes that already exist, would a Waikato trained graduate possibly find it more difficult than their Otago/Auckland counterparts to get onto a non-GP training path, and be somewhat forced in that direction anyway?