i can't see the frustrated 35mm crowd
Then I think you aren't looking at it right. Everyone who uses MF *and* 35mm is a potential customer. If you could replace your 35mm FF cameras *and* your MF stuff with an S2, would you consider it? Clearly not everyone can get away with that, but Leica's bet is that enough can to keep them alive, and even to make them thrive. There are additional potential customers on both sides of that line, but it could work... The weather-sealing could be Leica's ace in the hole for certain customers; unmatched on the MF side.
we have to wait how much better the leica lenses are in real compared to hc lenses the same with your high iso performance
prediction.
I think that it is not unreasonable to expect each of the Leica lenses to be at least as good as anything else out there. This is already the case with their existing lenses, both SLR and M. Leica has the best technology in the world for making aspherical lens elements, and that by some margin, so if anyone can raise the bar, it is Leica. Anyone who has worked with recent Leica lenses knows this. The prices are another story, and zooms are a wild-card, not Leica's traditional strength, but they may be gaining experience for both auto-focus and zooms via Panasonic. They do need to use that knowledge properly in the MF segment.
The high ISO performance is really not a stretch at all. Existing 33x44mm 31MP sensors in Phase One and Hasselblad backs are already performing for pros at ISO 800 (see Guy's comment about his P25+, and that has a stop less performance at high ISO than the P30+...). For Leica's new 30x45mm Kodak sensor to match that is almost a given, and since a few years have passed, expecting one more stop of performance is really almost pessimistic. Leica will be using microlenses, and apparently the advances there might even give them more. How about a clean ISO 800, good ISO 1600, and ISO 3200 in a pinch? The question is not so much if it will outperform existing 31MP sensor, but more by how much.
hasselblad and phase are sure not under a shock because leica announced the s2 and stopped immediately every form of developmenrt ;-)
Surely. They might need to closely look at their marketing strategy in that segment, however, if Leica has any success. At the moment, they are betting that the same platform is good enough for everyone, but with the iffy software, patchy reliability and low performance of many of these systems, this could be a bad strategy. Leica is aimed straight at a weak spot in existing MF manufacturers' lineups, namely the border to FF-35mm, where they are losing ground every year. There are photographers with money there, looking for the right system for them. The S2 is Leica's wedge to drive that crack wide open.
Again, the devil is in the details, and who knows if they will succeed. But I think that the basic strategy is sound, the execution so far looks right on track, the performance should be comfortably attainable, and the success or failure of the whole deal is more likely to lie in reliability, pricing and availability, both to purchase and to rent (as well as the performance of the AF).