The "we know what's best for Nintendo" crowd has been fervent in their prognostications since the Circle Pad Pro was announced months and months ago. Obviously it was just a stop-gap release, a way to appease suckers who bought the original 3DS, and who would be vexed when the inevitable system redesign came with that second circle pad built in.
Clearly, this future did not come to pass.
Let's think about that Circle Pad Pro for a second. A rarely-exploited add-on, it added a second slide pad to the right side of the system, along with a second set of shoulder buttons. An argument could be made that you could fit a second slide pad on the right-hand side of a 3DS revision, more easily if the revision increased the system size (which the XL here indeed does). But what damns the possibility out the gate is that Nintendo couldn't just implement only one part of the Circle Pad Pro, if the idea would be to natively support any software built with that Circle Pad Pro in mind. If they were gonna do any of it, they'd have to do all of it. And that means managing to fit four shoulder buttons on what's supposed to be a thin and portable handheld.
The physical logistics are a secondary point, though. It's really about fracturing the userbase. We're just barely over a year into the 3DS lifespan—Nintendo needs to keep these people happy, and keep them buying games. The second you add new control mechanisms to a revision, it's no longer a revision. It's a new system. Look at the DSi. Its cameras, new firmware, and DSi Shop solidified it as a platform that can play software you just flat-out cannot play on previous versions of the hardware. They could get away with that, though, since it was so far into the DS lifespan. That market was solidified, and the new DSi features were really mainly exploited for downloadable software, not retail.
A 3DS revision with a second slide pad and two additional shoulder buttons would find itself in one of two scenarios. Either games would start appearing that leveraged these new inputs heavily, and required vanilla 3DS owners to purchase the Circle Pad Pro in order to play them, or the inputs would rarely be used, resulting in largely vestigial buttons that do nothing but clog the system up and frustrate gamers. The 3DS has already launched several of its evergreen sellers, titles like Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land. When new buyers find that half of the buttons on their system just "do nothing" in the games they buy, well, that's just pretty silly.
I've also heard people that are shocked to discover that this 3DS XL here does not have a higher resolution screen. I am... not sure people understand how resolution works. If you up the resolution, every single 3DS game that isn't tailor-made for the XL will be stretched and blurry. Every new game made with the higher-resolution screen in mind would also require a second lower-resolution display mode to support the original 3DS model. It's userbase fragmentation, just like the new input methods. When you change the capability of hardware, you encourage software that either works poorly—or not at all—on previous iterations.
I wonder what this 3DS XL means for the future of the Circle Pad Pro. The existing CPP won't even come close to fitting on the new hardware, so they'd have to release a "Circle Pad Pro XL" in order to keep things compatible. Supposedly the XL doesn't come with a charging dock in the box, and will offer one as a separate purchase, so selling a new CPP doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility. Maybe, somehow, the two might even be combined! Or maybe they just won't release one at all, and they'll let the CPP die a quiet death. It's not like it's seen heavy support so far, and really it seems pretty counter to the whole 3DS philosophy in general. I'm not sure why they ever released it in the first place, Nintendo knows very well that "emulate console experiences" is not the way to success in the portable market.
The 3DS XL comes out on August 19th, same day as New Super Mario Bros 2, and will retail for $199.99. I know a lot of people have been holding out for the "inevitable" 3DS revision, but I'm personally not really sold. Yeah, we've got bigger screens here, and improved battery life—but the thing is friggin' huge. And it's not like the DS lite, which radically improved on the original Nintendo DS form factor. If anything, it looks kinda gross! Solid, sure, but brutish and devoid of nuance. And there's no way it'll fit in my pocket, and if I can't pocket it, I can't earn steps and pathetically fail at acquiring any significant amount of StreetPass tags. I bet it's more comfortable to hold, though. Is that worth two hundred bucks?
UGH! At least it's not crammed with a million more useless buttons and sticks. But no one in their right mind expected that anyway.