I'm sure many of us internet denizens have pirated, whtehr you watched a movie or tv show that was posted online, downloaded a game or song or whatever else has been done. This is something that's not going away soon, and any measurements taken will ultimately be circumvented. The question isn't 'What should we be doing to stop the pirates?!', it's 'How can we create a profitable business model from all this?' Eventually, music is going to be free. With sites like spottify released in the last couple of years we've already seen that music can be free, with the rise of flash games and social network gaming on sites like Facebook we've seen that games can not only be successful when free, but profitable!
I'll admit that a AAA title takes more time, money and manpower than Farmville, but it's a start. Recently a company in India announced a laptop that was made at the cost of $35, including all the standard hardware, wi-fi hardware and USB ports (http://wimp.com/indiacomputer/). This is huge for the technology and gaming industry and has many implications. For instance, who will want to spend £40 or $60 on a game when the hardware costs less? This will mean there has to be a lot of thinking done in these industries about how they are going to deal with this. Admittedly, the price of the laptop may rise depending on the software they decide to use for the operating system (here's hoping it's freeware) but this is still big.
Making the R4 illegal won't do a thing, people will still download the ROMs, still buy the cards and still commit these acts of piracy, they always will if they can. Even the gesture of outlawing it and claiming it as a win for Nintendo doesn't mean a thing in the long run. Looked at what happened at the start of the bif piracy panick, Napster got shut down and certain individuals were targeted for lawsuits for downloading illegal content. Did this stop the community at large? Did it make it harder to access and download illegal content? No, it didn't. If Nintendo wants to go on a tirade, wasting resources on bringing people to justice over this then so be it, but it won't stop anything, it will barely make a dent.
The world at large needs to have a big think about how we can give people what they want and still retain their ability to make profit off of it in some way.