Learning what? The fabled and non-written rule of law that the hardware in an handheld should be highly profitable garbage?
There is a market for high-end handheld. The PSP was an high-end handheld, with limited input functionality (no touchscreen) and mobility (wifi only), it was release at the beginning (if not before) of the whole mobile internet mainstream era, and it yet was a successful product for Sony.
Was it a different product than the Nintendo DS? Yes, and that's good! The last thing I'd want is to see another PS360 situation where two machines are stupidly redundant of one another.
I'll get a NGP for my high-end portable gaming, media consumption and internet browsing (in conjunction with my smartphones, netbooks and tablets. It's not one or another when it could be any) and a 3DS for the 3DS exclusives.
But I seriously won't let the idea of thinking that Sony might not have as much market share as Nintendo in the handheld space affect my purchase decisions.
Save for the potentially stupidly low battery life of the thing, I'm positively surprised by the quality of the product. It's like it addressed all my personal issues with handheld gaming. Save for that disgusting interface, it's almost the perfect gaming handheld to me. Now, if they allowed some sort of homebrew on it, so we can get emulators running on it, it would be the perfect gaming handheld.
There wasn't a big smart phone gaming (and other entertainment apps.) market back then.
At the time, the PSP featured a screen at a price which couldn't be easily matched, not to mention the broadband engine in it.
Now, we may be seeing the growth of a tablet market. You won't get bigger OLED screens in tablets that soon. But performance-wise, it seems tablet SOCs will catch up and pass the performance of this NGP thing in a couple of years.
We don't know the price of the thing. With 3G, at least in the US, you may have to sign a data contract.
If they can get it under $350 without a contract, they could win sales from tablets. But if the price is comparable to tablets (and why wouldn't it be, given the hardware), then people will have to choose between a game-centric tablet/PMP and tablets which aren't as good for games but may be stronger for other media (HDMI output, more photo and video apps., etc.).
I'd rather play immersive, detailed games like Uncharted on a PS3 (but if I commuted on trains or flew a lot, I might think differently). Where this could be interesting is if in addition to games you can't get on smart phones/tablets, you got the general mobile apps. that are available on those other devices.
For instance, instead of buying a GPS, if they had GPS apps. for this NGP along with car cradles and such, it would make the device more attractive. It doesn't have to have as many apps. as iOS or Android but cover all the categories, like being able to your banking, things like Evernote and a modern browser.