Agreed it is a stop gap, that said I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo keeps it around as a budget option for several more years.

Nintendo Fusion (portable) - $229.99 launch price
New 3DS (standard) - $129.99 (price drop)
New 3DS XL - $169.99

Would allow Nintendo to cover a broad spectrum of pricing options and not have to gimp the Fusion so hard tech wise because they're worried about the lower end market.

With the eShop, N3DS can have thousands of games available for it (allow DS games to be downloaded from the eShop, the Wii U has Wii games, so why not?), you don't need a new game released every month for such a platform.

People keep comparing the N3ds to previous "revisions" need to stop as the N3ds has enhanced hardware that will allow it to play exclusive games. I don't recall the Gameboy Advanced SP being able to play games the advanced couldn't, or the N64 upgrade vs. the regular N64, etc. The N3ds is very different in that respect.

Agreed. And yea to the eshop DS thing. It will be a whole lot easier for Nintendo to put ds games unto 3ds/New 3ds because the devices have pretty much the same size and but have the + pad to control things. Would be easy to port over.

Doubt it... Heck, apart from the hardware, the n3ds launched with one exclusive thats a port with no other exclusives in sight... Which serious handheld does that?

Gameboy Color

Gameboy Color and Nintendo DSi had exclusive titles not playable on previous models.

I don't think its powerful or "new" enough to fulfill that role.

Having said that people will compare N3DS to past revisions but none of them quite come close to the improvements N3DS is offering and how this will translate into the real world. I don't remember the gameboy colour getting any real exclusives, nor the DSi (just tiny digital games).

lol, sorry I just mimicked your post below.

I doubt there will be all that many New 3DS only titles either.

Xenoblade is more of something to help introduce/push that brand to more Nintendo fans, but it wouldn't run on a normal 3DS, that's all there is to it.

Not many devs are going to make New 3DS-only titles, why limit your userbase to like maybe 5-8 million versus the full 50 million 3DS users? Not gonna happen.

New 3DS is basically the exact same thing as a the DSi was -- that had a CPU upgrade + more RAM + new OS too. Nintendo promised new DSi-only games for that too, but I'm guessing at some point they just decided to ditch that plan and focus on the 3DS. 

Just like gameboy color and dsi. It's just a hardware revision.