I'm still quite puzzled by the entire Cafè design. The touchscreen pad idea sounds incredibly... uncomfortable.
It's not without pros, for sure:
- RPG games with the pad acting as a map, or a permanently open inventory
- FPS/survival horror/action RPG with the pad being a status screen (ammo, maybe localized damage a la MGS3, etc)
- the screen acting as a comm interface in itself (MGS: the codec conversation happens on the pad screen, with audio from the pad speakers, and you can keep active as Snake on the main screen)
and the list goes on.
The cons, however, are massive too:
- that thing will be heavy as hell, and unwieldy to boot. I can't really imagine myself playing Street Fighter on that. The same issue happened with the wiimote, but still.
- it's gonna be... delicate. We drop pads. Often. One of the great things about the DS3 is that the non-vibrating model was more or less weightless. You could drop it and it would bounce back into your hands. The X360 pad (one of the best pads to date, IMHO) was a lot heavier, but dropping it was less likely given how ergonomic it is. This thing? Sure, we do hold iPads, but we play Devil May Cry on them? I can't picture myself being comfortable with that.
- the third core issue is... the pros are radical. There's some great gamebuilding to be done around such a pad (Aliens-inspired FPS... the pad screen acts as the sonar-thing; action RPG with 3 dozen abilities tied to touchscreen icons; MMOs that can actually work on consoles; I could go on all day); however, if the rest of the industry doesn't follow, either developers go around implementing "inferior" versions of the same mechanics on PC/other consoles (can't really see that happen, or rather, publishers wanting it to happen) or the full use of the pad is limited to exclusive (both first and third party). Once again... good luck with that.
I'm warming up on the idea of that pad (with a different design, if possible, I think a GCN mockup with the screen resting where the second stick was would be ideal), because it's definitly thickling my game-building fantasy, but pulling it off right and making it a success will be very, very hard.