I thought about getting a New3DS as I too will soon have enough to upgrade from my original 3DS. But the only games I'm interested in that might be exclusive to it or might have enhanced features would be the 7th gen Pokemon games whenever they come out. Current Pokemon games do not run any better on the New3DS so there's no point in me wasting the extra money on buying one.
So it will be another year before I see myself getting one. On the downside though, if I do wait like I expect that I will, it will be harder to get one that is on a fw that's exploitable by Gateway. The launch units are pretty much expected to be on 9.0/9.2 at this point. It's going to be the 4.5 situation all over again. The launch units and perhaps the next batch might still have an exploitable firmware, but all new ones made after that will not.
The small size version of the New3DS WILL come to the USA. Nintendo just decided to not release it right now. I'm sure they're already getting a lot of backlash for it and will cave at some point and make that available too. But it will come much later and by then they will already be on 9.3/9.4 and beyond. So I'm pretty sure the USA normal New3DSs will never have the exploitable firmware. While the New3DS XL (or LL as Nintendo wants to call it) will have 9.0/9.2 on the first/second batch produced.
After that they will become on increasingly rare commodity like the old XL was with 4.5 fw. So I'll probably end up having to pay more for one on 9.2 if I wait until next year.
But despite that, I'm still going to wait.
EDIT: However if someone finds that missing connection on the motherboard to finally get NAND mods working on the New3DS, I might consider getting one earlier.
