I think it'll let them make harder games. For a game to be profitable and for the medium of video games as a whole to remain sustainable, it has to appeal to a wide audience, and right now that means you need to make it easy enough that it won't frustrate everyone. With this system, they can make games that are hard enough to satisfy hardcore gamers but can still have a big enough audience to be worth making. The same way that an advanced reader can spend time finding all the nuances of the Communist satire in Animal Farm and a simpler one can laugh at the funny talking animals, a casual Bible reader can just bookmark the Proverbs they like while an avid apologist will spend hours cross-checking footnotes to put together a detailed systematic theology, or a chef can use pepperoni in an intricate gourmet pasta dish while a hungry college student just eats it straight out of the bag, it will allow different people to interact with games on as deep or as shallow a level as they choose, given their interest level and free time.
The challenges are still there and just as hard -- once everyone can beat them, there's no excuse any longer for making them overly easy -- there's just an entirely optional way to skip them if lack of time, skill, patience, or desire call for it. I shouldn't have to watch those Senate scenes at the beginning of Attack of the Clones every time I want to see Padme's midriff; that's why they invented DVD chapters. Of course we ought to play the game the way it's meant to be played, just as we ought to watch movies from beginning to end, but we shouldn't have to do it strictly that way every time (it's not just for the casuals -- once I've read Harry Potter eight times, in addition to reading it straight through again, I can skip ahead to the parts I like, past the less interesting parts that I've practically memorized by now anyway). Don't forget that a lot of the fun of most games comes with playing with them in ways the developer hadn't ever really intended. It's a lot of fun and very fulfilling to spend hours putting together the perfect park in Roller Coaster Tycoon, but sometimes it's just as fun, if not more so, to get as many peeps as you can onto a single square of path over water and then delete it and drown them all at once. It's also fun sometimes to just switch on god mode -- an experience that is no less destructive of the spirit of gaming than Miyamoto's "demo mode."
And in an odd way, it brings gaming back to its roots. Growing up on the NES and SNES, most of us had a sibling or friend or even a parent who was significantly better at the game than we were. Today those mentor figures are more often than not absent for new learning gamers (which, never forget, we once were), but the act of a young, still-learning gamer passing the controller to their gaming superior sitting next to them and watching them blaze through the world -- not so that we could skip the level, but so that we could learn how to do it ourselves the next time around and ultimately become more skilled and self-reliant -- can make a comeback.
Will people overuse and abuse it? Of course. The same kind of lame people will also write "word" 50,000 times in a .txt file so they can "win"
NaNoWriMo and get a little icon that says WINNER on it, but are they going to have the same kind of personal satisfaction as someone who actually wrote a novel without cheating? Moreover, do you really lose anything because they did that? It's not like we get paid to get to the end of games; all games are ultimately
Bragging Rights Rewards, far more about the journey than the destination, and if you just put the game on autopilot, there's nothing to brag about. But in a world where games are harder and most people do put them on autopilot, actually beating it on your own (and I'm sure games will feature ways to prove that you did it on your own, a bit like the Golden Wheel; I think it's even mentioned in the patent) will become even more of a status symbol -- and one that many more people will be able to acknowledge and appreciate because they've all played the game too and know for themselves how hard it is. Will we be tempted to use it? I know I will, but once again, that only makes it even more of an accomplishment to actually do it legitimately. It's not Nintendo's fault if I can't discipline myself to play through the whole game, it's my own problem.
And putting aside the achievement aspect for a bit of humility, I readily admit that I've played many, many games where as much as I enjoyed the game, I got stuck in one spot and ended up putting it down and never going back to it (or if I did go back to it, it'd been so long since I played that I realized I'd completely forgotten what happened up until then and had to start over). From where I'm sitting now I can see at least ten games on my shelves that I wish I could finish but probably never will. I could go to GameFAQs, find a solution (not a whole 200-page walkthrough, mind you, just the one missing piece to get past this one spot that's eluded me for months or even years), print it out, and bring it with me when I play them next time (probably running into more than a few big spoilers for the games while I'm online, especially considering how old they are by now), but this system would let me do effectively the same thing right there in the game, get past that one spot with a precision-strike deus ex machina, and then get right back on the horse for the rest of the game. No game is perfect, and there will always be at least one spot in the game that turns out to be a lot harder to do or to figure out than the developers thought it would be. I shouldn't abandon a game just because of one flaw that's ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of the game, but if it bottlenecks me and I'm forced to figure it out on my own, I'll probably just end up leaving.
That was a lot longer than I expected it to be. Sorry if it sounds kind of pompous and overly loquacious at times, I tend to sound like that.