definitely, I agree that Nintendo ought to be keeping track of stats such that it could generate a leaderboard if it wanted to.  And it should be using them to match people like xbox live does.  And  it can even feel free to give me some kind of relative score of how much better it thinks someone is than me so that I don't feel as bad when I lose and feel great when I win.  But I don't want to constantly be reminded of how bad I am at something in the way that a leaderboard does by giving an exact rank or percentile.  How annoying would it be if every time you went to play basketball, someone sat on the sidelines yelling at you every time you missed that you just dropped another skill point and now another 100,000 people are better than you?  And yet, somehow, in video games, just because this information is "available" we want to know it.

Which brings me to another point, and that is, the fact that a leaderboard for most games is going to be wrong.  No one has yet developed a system of stat tracking and formulas that we agree ranks baseball players or college football teams, to name two, accurately despite millions of dollars that would be made by perfecting such a system, and yet people think that the game developer that has spent significantly less time working on the problem has created a system that ranks people playing their game accurately?  Maybe for some games, but certainly not for all of them or even most of them.