I get it.
The Vita failed because it wasn't a good mass market product, plain and simple. It has good hardware, absolutely, but a good product for the market it is in? Absolutely not. It's not just the memory issue and strong hardware is detrimental when your console is poorly designed to adequately utilize it.
The Vita is too weak to get seamless ports of the types of big-budget, AAA "console quality" games its hardware was build and advertized to play, and it's too expensive to make Vita specific ports of those games to be worth the effort. That's why it doesn't get major western 3rd party support, and nothing can change that because the Vita was designed poorly to take advantage of that. It doesn't get compelling and consistant first party game support either, which relegates its library to mostly niche games. A library of primerily niche (japanese and indie) titles is terrible for a mass market product no matter how good or well advertized they are, and the sole reason for that niche library is because the Vita is poorly built to host the kind of mainstream library it marketed itself to host. Also, a large portion of the handheld market is children whether people here like to admit it or not, so instead of nurturing a library that could appeal to that huge demographic, they tried to make a system with a library that only appeals to an older, more hardcore, much more niche to handhelds, demographic. That's a major execution issue.
It also suffers from something the DS brand never had to deal with: being a multimedia device. People like to say that mobile is killing handhelds, and those people are wrong, but they absolutely are killing the Vita, because the PSP brand was not just a handheld gaming brand - it was a portable media device brand. People like to forget this, but a massive reason the PSP was successful was not because it was a good gaming handheld, but because it was the best mobile media device on the market at the time. You could browse the internet better than anything else at the time, watch movies better than anything else at the time, and listen to music on the go. DVD commercials at the time actively advertised buying PSP disks for movies. If the PSP didn't have this multimedia leg up on top of being a homebrewers wet dream, it would have sold less than half of what it ended up selling, which would have cut its 3rd party support, which would have hurt its sales even more.
Then the iphone came and did all of that better and with a phone to add to that. And there's no way the Vita could compete with smartphones on being a multimedia device this late in the market, especially when it didn't have any of the things necessary to do so. A successor to what the PSP was for its market would have been a fully featured phone. It would have been much smaller, and it likely would have been either built on Android, or would have pioneered its own OS specifically built to compete with iOS and Android. That's the only way it could have competed, and I think it's clear by Sony's other recent mobile efforts how well that likely would have gone. The DS brand never had that brand expectation, meaning it never had to compete there. That's an execution issue.
The Vita failed to execute on so many angles that it's literally no suprise it wasn't a successful device. It's not a well designed product. There's no luck to anything. The 3DS is more successful because Nintendo designed a better product for its market than Sony did with the Vita.
Even with the NXDS, the only reason that will get expensive AAA console quality games is because it's being built on a platform specifically designed to make getting those games working as cheap and effortless as possible. They don't have to design a port specifically for the handheld. They just have to make a game for the platform and scale it down, which is a much simpler and cheaper than doing a full port for a significantly weaker peice of hardware with significantly different architecture from what they're used to working on like with the Vita. That device is being much better designed for its market and what its trying to be, even before the system is out, than the Vita was. If getting a game working on the Vita was just as simple as building a PS4 game and scaling it down with no other porting effort needed, you bet your ass the Vita would be getting 90% of PS4 games, including first party titles.
It's annoying when people say only mobile killed the Vita. It's annoying when people say only Sony support killed the Vita. It's annoying when people say only memory cards killed the Vita. It's about time someone said the real reason the Vita died, and that's because it was a bad product. Doesn't mean it doesn't have great games, because it has plenty. Doesn't mean it doesn't have strong hardware either, because it's hardware has a luxury quality no other gaming handheld has achieved. But the Vita is design 101 on how not to design and market a mass market gaming handheld. It failed because it did everything above terribly. It's an execution nightmare.
