Seems to be taken out of context.

Hirai said "there is a market" for portable consoles. That means with or without Sony's entry. The same would be said if the PS4 never became a reality; there would still be a market in home consoles even if PS4 didn't exist.

past performance does not guarentee future success. 

3DS already had 1 emergency price cut.  3DSs second calendar year barelly was up YoY despite have a 3 extra months on the market.  the games library is significantly smaller then the kind of support the DS had.  Games cost between 4 to infinatly times more than the games on competitive devices. 

..i don't care how good pokemon or mario is.  that market can and likely will disappear.  3DS will survive.  but if nintendo (and everyone else for that matter) don't adapt to the changing market then they'll be about as relavent as a stage coach repair shop after the introduction of cars.

Well even if Vita wont work out as well as they hoped PS4 do nicely especially in Europe IMO

Hard to argue against you :P

But I think Nintendo has already begun the transition. The 3DS-eshop is growing bigger and bigger with many pretty cheap and yet VERY good digital games. And even if you don't care how good Mario or Zelda are, many millions of people DO care and are willed to pay the full retail price. Nintendo has been in the market longer than anybody else, I'm faithful they'll manage to be able to sell us handhelds in the future. As long as they stay innovative they have a very good chance. 

Good to hear.
I've been playing mostly portables these days, most the good innovative games are on handhelds.

Also to note the only game that was a huge hit in 2012 was NSMB2 and WiiU came out! This year with the exception of japan we'll get Fire emblem and the multi million seller AC new leaf. We have also Luigi mansion worldwide which will sell alot, Japan gets its prime games such as DQ7 and MH4, and we dont even kno wat nintendo's ip will be for summer or Winter maybe DK and Starfox? Also ummmmm...... POKEMON X/Y. That game alone this year will sell over 10mil

To be fair, if he's making money on the Vita, why stop? It doesn't need to win the generation or even sell 10m to be a financial success.

Are you sure it'll manage to bring in the R&D costs with 10m sales? That would be 2,5bn $ - retailers profit - production costs. I don't think it'll break even at 10Mil sales, not even talking about profits here.

I'm not so sure, Gamecube made more profit than the PS2 I believe.

According to this article the Vita was being sold at loss at least 2011, even if this no longer is the case I'm pretty sure Vita won't manage to take in R&D costs fo a while. Gamecube moved lots of software compared to the Vita, much of it 1st party. That's the big difference.