Honestly I doubt Nintendo cares about selling consoles to game pirates. They, like everyone else in that business, make their money on game sales.

Or try to, anyway.

At the time they were the only functioning solution (They may still be? I'm out of the loop now) and everything else on the market were clones of their cards.

It was almost like a hostage situation with the community, a lot of people hating on the company, while hyping up their next update.