nintendo is going through its dark age only to be followed (hopefully) by a renisance period of unimagenable wealth and prosperity and games
I agree that its only a matter of time, but however i seriously doubt i'll ever see it in my lifetime
Nintendo have to wait until the market get bored of Sony, which i guess will happen some time around PS7. Also Iwata's tactics are a disgrace outside of Japan, advertising aside they're just not forcing shops to sell consoles.

but i have this bad feeling that nintendo might not pay much attention to online gaming... again
I think nintendo won't use as much as Sony or MS do at the moment where most games will have an online feature, but they will use it selectively for certain games eg. Animal Crossing. The amount of online success revolution has depends on 3rd party support, which should be good as many developers eg. Free Radical - TS3 wanted GC versions of their games to have online but Nintendo would not assist in the setup, if Revolution already has it then devvers will happily take advantage.
As for the retro downloads, i think the NES and SNES will work great as you can store hundreds of NES/SNES games on a single SD card, but won't N64 games take up loads of space?