*shrug* They took 20 years to make Miis come to life (they had a similar thing on the Famicom Disk System), and look how those turned out.
Miyamoto talked about tenacity being one of his three personal tenets in game design. He's been kicking around the Mii concept for 20-odd years ever since the Famicom Disk Systemn, through to N64's Talent Studio, and finally to their realization ALL THESE YEARS LATER on the Wii. Likewise, Nintendo, as a company heavily invested in R&D and creativity, has been trying to create new experiences with online games for years, from the Famicom going online to trade stocks and bet on horse races (obvious non-game activities, but this was back in the '80s!), to the Super Famicom's Broadcast Satellaview system where players would all play simultaneously at the same time with a narrator broadcast to their system describing the world's changing events in REAL TIME, to the 64DD, which though it failed was the original platform for Animal Crossing and lives on through that game.
You look at that rich, diverse, creative, long-term, storied and dedicated development history, and it's easy to appreciate how they've been online for years and never quite satisfied with their implementation. They want more.
~Carmine "Cai" M. Red
Kairon@aol.com