There will surely be a slow trickle of Neo Geo games and the occasional Capcom release, but with the release of the Wii U, and the announcement of a Wii that drops literally all backward compatibility including the Virtual Console, I think we can safely assume the Wii Virtual Console is essentially dead. And having just now established its death, it seems like an appropriate, if artificial, opportunity to look back, to determine how successful an experiment Nintendo's old games marketplace was.
While there is plenty to lament about how the service turned out, it's easy to overlook just how unprecedentedly fantastic it is, even in its current state.