Paying a fee to store Pokemon is totally fair.  Doing so merely to transfer them from the old games, something that was available for free in the past, is lame.  Hopefully there will be a free trial period in the West as well for anyone that just wants to do some quick transfers.

So 20 years from now if you want to transfer Pokemon for Black to Y you can't because Nintendo has long abandoned the service?  This is what I don't like about cloud stuff.  If I want to transfer between Blue and Gold I can still do it now years after those games were current and I'll be able to do it for the rest of my life if I can keep ahold of working hardware.

So i can not transfer directly from diamond or soulsliver to y?
THAT SUCKS!

It does seem odd that they didn't set it up to work with all the DS Pokémon titles, especially since they're charging for it.

It's to futureproof you pokemon. Five bucks for a year's service is literally nothing.

I wonder if the limitation of preventing DS Pokemon from straight to X/Y is to help prevent hacked Pokemon.

I'm not arguing against it costing money, just saying that if they're charging for it, I don't get why the Transpoprter doesn't work directly with Diamond/Pearl and the Gold/Silver remakes. I guess they're banking on people willing to pay for it having already transferred from those older games to Black/White.

Well, you can transfer stuff from Black and White 1/2, but yeah hacked Pokemon will get rejected by the service.

And Black and White couldn't do anything with the GBA games, despite the possibility being there if you still had a DS Phat/Lite.

But you could theoretically import from the GBA games to Diamond/Pearl, and then go there to HeartGold/SoulSilver, and then move all of those to Black/White, from which point you can get them all into X and Y and have all 9,000 currently available Pokémon.

My Lucario will be GONE!! :'(