I'm no expert, but a few things from the various comments here came to mind :
It may LOOK fake because it's an unfinished product, a placeholder. They don't need to make it pretty if it's not retail yet.
The SNES had the ability of running chips through the cartdridge slot, as we know from Star Fox, Megaman X or even Star Ocean. So it's not farfetched to think that they could have made an add-on that'd use the basic SNES as a passthrough to the TV, probably something similar to the Sega CD and 32X. But given how 'good' those Sega add-ons were to the Genesis, I'll side with the opinion that *maybe* we were better without them.
That said, maybe it would have been better than the Sega version too. It depends on the product, it's capacities, the marketing and the games made for it. The Sega 32X and CD were only terrible because the developers didn't follow with the idea (not-withstanding other concerns like production costs and what not). A more recent example is how things go with the Wii and WiiU. Where they get really solid First-Party titles because they know how to handle their own hardware, many other companies apparently couldn't figure out how to use the Wiimote for anything more than waggle-fests. Some titles were good though, but most couldn't use the controls as well as Nintendo does (Zelda Skyward Sword, Wario Ware...).
So is it Nintendo that did a confusing console/control scheme, or the developers that lack the imagination to use it? It's hard to tell, I'd be inclined it's somewhere in between. The Sega-CD/32X may have been in a similar situation, and maybe the SNES-CD would also have.