My feeling is that most of the handheld market's shrinking has already occurred. So if the 3DS ends up around 70 million sold lifetime, the "4DS" or whatever would sell at least 50 million; enough to justify it being supported heavily for at least half a decade, especially with the rising attach rates handhelds are offering. And that's assuming Nintendo doesn't come up with a revolutionary new piece of hardware or software that boosts the market ala Pokemon or the DS.
What will change is that a larger portion of games will probably be digital only, and shovelware will largely disappear. But so long as Nintendo makes smart decisions in terms of making hardware easy to make/port games for, they should get by on the handheld front.
Nintendo's big question should be "how do we make handhelds an essential device for at least one demographic?" Currently, that niche is filled by smartphones. The 4DS could try competing as a multimedia device, like the PSP did with some success, or it could find a way to create a new necessity in peoples' lives like the Game Boy, NES, PS1, and Wii before it.
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