I dunno, lately I've come around to understanding where Nintendo is coming from in terms of their reluctance to jump into online gaming. Nintendo's core philosophy is making games that appeal to everyone. This means that many of their games have to be accessible to a wide audience, so you don't want any "barriers to accessibility". Examples of these barriers are:
1. Overly complex control schemes
2. Graphics/Presentation that may turn some people off (mature themes, blood and gore, etc.)
3. A degree of technical proficiency required to even play the game
4. Ongoing monetary investment (beyond the money originally required to buy the game)
Obviously, #3 and #4 are what makes online gaming unattractive to Nintendo right now. Unless your mom is an IT engineer, there's no way she would know how to hook up your XBox and get it going online - it's not gonna happen. Nintendo wants completely the opposite of that - they want a game that your mom can pick up, play, and love. They want their network gaming to just "work".
Nintendo also doesn't want to have to charge players an upkeep fee to keep online game servers running. This isn't because they care about us broke gamers (they don't, they really want our money); it's because they realize that if they figure out some way to allow ALL gamers to go online for free (not just those with enough disposable income to blow on a monthly fee), they'll make a ton of money from game sales potentially bolstered by the phenomenon of free online play. They really want EVERYBODY to be able to play online, not just that hardcore 20% or whatever. Until they figure that out, they aren't going to budge.
So to bring this back to Revolution, I'm sure it's going to have some sort of Wi-Fi capability. A friend of mine had a great idea about this, actually: peer-to-peer Wi-Fi console networking. As soon as you turn on your Revolution, its wireless adapter could connect to a "Kazaa"-type P2P wireless network and you'd instantly be able to play whoever you wanted on whatever game you happened to have. If there were any consoles in your apartment building, you'd instantly be able to challenge them. And, best of all, it'd be free. There wouldn't be much upkeep...the network would just "exist". I'm not technical enough to judge whether or not this would be doable, but take the Wi-Fi networking of the GameBoy Wireless Adapter, expand that to a massive scale, and you get the idea.
Either way, Nintendo will go full steam ahead when they have a solution that is 1) free; and 2) instantly accessible to everyone with no technical knowledge required.
silks