I almost wonder if a company like Nintendo would ever discover exploits in their code behind closed doors and then knowingly not patch them until the last second just to save some money and troll cart makers once they actually try to make a pirate's profit. Granted that might be giving them too much credit but the thought's always crossed my mind.
What I find legitimately interesting about this though this means that Gateway might have been using previously known tricks to get 3DS hardware "access" the entire time or at least just to get their cart to load.