I always look at the comments of waving the 3DS as some kind of wonder item, the best selling system of the year, so on and so forth statements in the hopes that it will be evidence that Nintendo is not on the downhill slide towards a non-entity like Atari... that they dominate the hand held market.
Well, considering that officially, the hand held market is only two real entries... Nintendo's 3DS/2DS and Sony's Vita. So of course when you compare those two things, you get a wonderfully rosy picture.
But then there is the realization that there is... well... more to the hand held market. We don't include the various apple products. You know, the Iphone and Ipad. Those are pretty much portable gaming. They move tons. Android phones and tablets? Tons. That is portable gaming.
So then, looking at it like that, Nintendo is really still a second rate product that hangs on the fact that they jealously guard a few IPs that keep people buying a product that if they didn't have Pokemon on it, it would be a foot note in history so far.
It is something to think about. Nintendo really needs to think about what they are doing but I doubt they will.