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Competing with VISA and the others is their goal here.

This is the correct answer. Discover has a payment network, which will afford Capital One the option to issue cards without relying on Visa or MasterCard. This is what Amex does.

I would assume primarily domestic cards (platinum, quicksilver, savor) will start being issued on the discover network, while travel cards (venture series) will not (initially) because of the high domestic and low international acceptance rate of Discover cards.

Discover acceptance abroad is actually not as bad as it might seem at a first glance: Discover owns Diners Club International, and as a result Discover cards are accepted everywhere Diners Club cards are and vice versa.

They also have some mutual acceptance agreements with JCB and China UnionPay and others. Just because there's no explicit Discover logo on a terminal/restaurant window doesn't mean a Discover card will actually not work.

It's not quite the reach of Visa or Mastercard, but international acceptance seems to be trending up.

Agreed - The ability to further increase that international acceptance rate leveraging existing relationships and cardholder numbers is a large part of the 35.3 billion dollar gamble Cap1 is making, and I'm willing to bet it pays off big time.

I'm riding high on Cap1, personally.

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