I am not convinced that there is enough evidence to unanimously declare that Gateway intentionally designed their launcher.dat to brick the consoles of 3ds users. If we assume that they did, however, it is unlikely that they'd need to put it in for Gateway 2.0 as well.
This is based on the information from Gateway that 2.0 will necessitate an FPGA update.
First of all, it is currently impossible for the existing clone carts to update their FPGA without some kind of hardware mod because of the way they have terminated the JTAG connectors on their FPGA to the back of their cart which the 3ds has no contacts for.
Secondly modifications on the FPGA will make it much easier for them to prevent the clones from copying their work by placing checks that make sure all the board components are all in order. In fact coming up with such countermeasures may be what has caused the release delays for 2.0.
Finally, they could also use the FPGA update procedure itself as a form of copy protection by making it do something like linking the 3ds with the Gateway Cart which would in essence make it impossible for clone manufacturers to just rip the code from the FPGA of a updated Gateway cart and apply it to their own cart through another interface such as the microusb port on the MT-Card or by making a new clone with an exact copy of the FPGA from a sample updated Gateway Cart.
They could even act really tricky about it and instead of using the copy protection to outright prevent copying, just allow the FPGA to work in crippled mode, making it crash frequently and corrupt save data. This would have the effect of giving the clones a reputation as being substandard products.
Thus, in all honesty it would be to the overall benefit of Gateway users if the rumors regarding a Gateway authored intentional brick turned out to be true. If this were the case, Gateway could just remove it in 2.0 and replace it with FPGA related protection. This would mean that Gateway 2.0 users would pretty much have zero chance of bricking their consoles due to the use of Gateway.
My opinion, however, is that the bricking problem is far more likely to be caused by a rare issue that can occur on Gateway because of a bug or due to the fact that the exploit their software is based on may be a bit unstable and unpredictable. This was probably simply exasperated by the clones when they copied the Gateway software and haphazardly modified it to work on their own carts.
If this is the case, then the bricking issue will very probably still persist in Gateway 2.0 since as of date, Gateway appears to have been unable to replicate the issue that causes it.
