Why is this news? It was hinted at e3

I doubt it will be paid. Just like PSN. Nintendo's strategy has always been aimed at affordable price and I think making every gamers pay for online is against their policy. Same thing with DLC, they said they were mainly against the idea of releasing not finished games just to make gamers pay for content but they are open to the idea of adding new original and fun content to their software after release aslong as the game still feel like a complete game at release. But honestly, only time will tell if they rly deal with DLC that way or if they start ripping off their costumers the same way so many other developers are doing right now.

IMO it would be stupid for them to make us pay for NN because it will never be as good as xbox live. Why would anyone pay for NN when you can have Xbox live that will probably still be way better? IMO NN can be competive aslong as its free.

Likely just a rebranding of the current infrastructure with newer DLC capabilities tossed in

I think you need to look up the phrase "catch up". Just because they're catching up that doesn't mean they become just as good as them.

They need it.

Which will be called "NiNet" by Japanese as they like to shorten everything.
That would be nice.

Uh... not sure if serious. That Nintendo Network was a way of showcasing everything about Nintendo during E3 through the internet. The symbol on the game pack is obviously unrelated.

they'll have to make a ''Nintendo Network'' sooner or later, if not this gen, then definitely next gen, hope it's this

That was one of the reasonings why they didn't orginally go with a network setup simular to Microsofts, the infastructure to do so would be to cost inhibitive that they couldn't offer the service for free. I think they found out that it starting to cost them more keeping the fragmented network structure they have. So I hope for a PSN like structure, designed simularlly to the network service they had with the SNES. (I would also like it to be a unified network, but that may be expecting a little too much.)

Obviously they didn't want to make it that obvious by using the same logo. So that Nintendo Network was their way of foreshadowing the establishment of their network.