Well I'd argue that Nintendo getting legal on people largely over time has been a net positive. Maybe not so obvious to those who align with those they've gone after but big picture given what has happened in various places of the world where they've been less legal, dismissive, or ignoring of issues have cost them. I don't like their IP gooning at times, but being more in control has kept things in a better space than opening door to future problems. They have wanted to sell not at a loss at the detriment of having lesser powerful hardware, being overly stubborn, or cutting corners on some form of storage or another where it bit them in the ass. N64 not having CDs, the mini-dvds of cube, the crap hole WiiU entirely (on a non-hacked level) are good examples.
That said, their charm is their weird irrationality and strangeness along with the creativity of some of their workers because their IP is their most valuable walled garden of an asset.
cart before the 
horse! N64 games were designed around the limitations of the hardware, namely the idiotic lack of RAM and the idiotic decision to use cartridges. You might as well argue that a lot of PlayStation 1 games relied heavily on the fact that there was 700 megabytes of storage available and that those titles would not have been possible on a cartridge-based system.
