As many other outlets are reporting, last night, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime made an appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to show off Donkey Kong Country Returns (you can see the whole segment right here). While they were playing, Jimmy casually (albeit in a scripted way) asked Reggie about the 3DS, to which Reggie replied that we can expect it to launch "next year". Then Reggie subsequently pulled out a 3DS and blew Jimmy's mind (judging by his reaction).
I'm not sure we can take this as gospel just yet, but it would makes sense. After getting a lot of feedback from E3, Nintendo can use this extra time to make hardware tweaks. Developers can also use this time to finish preparing their launch titles, since I'm sure most of them haven't been working on their games for more than a few month.
While it sucks that we won't be able to get our hands on the 3DS this year, it's much better to wait for it to come out when it's ready rather than play an incomplete system that was rushed to market.
UPDATE (6-28): Now people within Nintendo are saying that this was a mistake on Reggie's part, and that the 3DS will actually be released this year. This all gets rather confusing when you try to figure out whether they mean "calendar year" or "fiscal year". I guess the bottom line here is that we don't know anything more about the 3DS launch date than we did at E3. Cool...
