This may mean a lot of things but not neccessarily a full hack. It may just be a POC of some sort that won't be useful to end users in a while. Still interesting and I look forward to the day I won't need to carry around a box with all my 3DS games.
That might be because of the 1.1 update fixing serious glitches in a couple levels. Other than that I don't think that has been required for any game.Back when I didn't have my 3DS updated, it disallowed me to play Mario Kart online as I had to update the system.
(A long while back, may have changed since then)