the way a game is announced has a lot to do with marketing, instead of announcing this with a bang they go out and do it like this. can you honestly say this is a smart move? 

announcement = the first time they show something about the game. plus, he didn't say E3 will be the first time we see it, he can lie.

sometimes i just love your posts. if he was lying, why would he say this in the first place?

Wait... so... This won't hurt them... but it will hurt them?  What?

No it doesn't. GTA V wasn't announced at E3 or any event for that matter, and iirc, it was announced on Facebook and Twitter, and that hasn't stopped the game from selling. CoD is a franchise that hasn't had an E3 reveal in years, every time it comes from a Twitter and Facebook announcement, and is still selling. Pokemon X/Y got announced at a Nintendo Direct, which according to many, it isn't a proper way to make announcement because very few people watch them. The way you announced a game have practically nothing to do with the game selling or not, how you market it after the reveal is a different story.

But to answer your question specifically, no this isn't a bad move, and it won't affect the game's preformance in any shape or form. 

to surprise people? who knows? the point is that it doesn't matter if they say there will be info for x franchise, at least not when it's so obvious. we all know nintendo consoles get 3d mario and mario kart early in it's life, so who cares if they said beforehand that those two would be at E3? what matters is that we don't know what we're gonna see from these new installments.

I almost totally agree with you. If Nintendo had saved the Mario 3D for a surprise at e3 (and had a live conference and showed the good trailer) instead of saying it was coming then Nintendo would have had far more buzz after the conference. The reason I don't is Zelda U is a little different. Everyone knows it's coming and going to be shown soon. If it wasn't shown by e3 of course it would be at e3. By saying we'll wait till then it's actually good so people won't be disappointed by every press release and ND between now and then.

I'd love no hand-holding too but unfortunately Aonuma has been quoted as saying he actually didn't enjoy the original Legend of Zelda because he couldn't figure out what to do (no sign-posts is how I think it was described) which unfortunately makes me think we're going to see more, not less, of the Navi type stuff and the contant hand-holding.

Make it a shared game world where other players can drop-in / drop-out and play together.

Make the overworld creatures like in Xenoblade where they do their own thing unless threatened. Make them fight and eat each other as might make sense. Create a believable world and just throw players in there free to discover various adventures within... so do so alone or with others.

Don't use text-flair characters to deliver instruction... just implement intelligent help prompts whenever the game detects players needs those control reminders.

And he also said recently that hand-holding isn't fun anymore.