I'm not too broken up over the dropped minigames.  After all, the main attraction is the fighting, and it's better that they improved that than spend time trying to improve on side-activities that aren't necessary to the core of the game.
 
As far as the removal of the animated endings, it sucks, but I can understand why that might have happened, too.  For one, they would have had to remove Hakushon Daimaou's ending at the very least for obvious reasons, and Tatsunoko would have had to animate new endings for the new characters, which they might not have had time for, or maybe the Capcom bean counters just didn't want to spring the extra budget for them (which the dev team can't be faulted for).
 
That being said, I just watched the endings on Youtube, and they are awesome.  Yatterman 1's ending in particular made me laugh hard.  Still, I'm sure that the game will be just fine without the animated endings.

Why in the world are they taking out the cutscenes? I wasn't planning on buying this anyway, but just because a few new characters wouldn't have animated endings mean none of them can have endings?

the only reason i play arcade style fighting games is to see the character endings.
 
its hardcoded into my dna from the tekken playstation one days

" Why in the world are they taking out the cutscenes? I wasn't planning on buying this anyway, but just because a few new characters wouldn't have animated endings mean none of them can have endings? "

My interest in this game is quickly fading... 
 Why are the western branches of Capcom filled with fucking morons?

I will wait on more credible reviews.  
 
The removal of both makes no sense, especially the animated cut scenes in favour of crappy Udon art.

I've expressed my disgust on the official forums. 
 
http://www.capcom-unity.com/tatsunokovscapcom/go/thread/view/57851/22211785?sdb=1&post_num=1#386485621

Kind of a negatively tinted summary ("only" 26 characters? really? "only" as many as SFIV?), I'm sure the full review reads much better given the 9/10 score. For example while most of the mini games are apparently gone the best one remains and has been enhanced for extra (re)playability. The newly added online mode sounds pretty robust as well, I doubt I'll be doing friend matches (I don't in SFIV) but it seems just like SFIV on PC.

It would be nice to know exactly which remain though, unless that's the only one... But this is certainly the superior version of the game, with a few downsides more than made up for by the improvements and new features over the initial Japanese version for sure.

Bummer about the endings though, I posted about it in the other thread. I said:

I think Udon only do the still images, the animated scenes should still be the original as they were still in the recent preview builds. Unless they're going to remove them for some silly reason like not bothering to make endings for the few new characters and therefor having Udon do all. Meh.

I like the old intro so I hope the new one is just the same with a few scenes added for the few new characters, like a sort of a director's cut version.

Edit: FUCK. The underlined above seems to have come true. The animated endings are gone according to the NP review according to GAF. Also gone are most of the mini games. I probably wouldn't play most more than once, and they at least kept and expanded the shoot em up which is a legitimate distraction, but still, unless the DVD was packed full of content they had no reason to remove them really. And with the animated endings gone, then it's nowhere near full despite the new characters. Oh well. Those would have been the cherry on the cake, the game's still valuable, imo.

JGonzo on Capcom Unity says they were removed due to licensing issues - BS   
 
If that's the case why not simply remove Genie and be done with it. This is blatantly down to them saving money, and targeting the West, with Western crap. They avoided commissioning Tatsunoko to do an animation set for 26 characters, because it would have significantly upped development costs. 

But they'd only need endings for like 4-5 characters, no? Most of the cast already had animated endings from the initial release... Oh well.

Yes well a new game deserves new endings, this is being released in Japan also after all. 
 
 It would give the game a stagnant feeling if it had the same endings.

For Japan it's more like a Super style version (with budget price), will SSFIV have new endings for all characters too (though it's certainly a bigger game for CAPCOM anyway even if it does)? Most of the Western audience hasn't seen the first version so it wouldn't be stagnant for them. For that matter, most of the Japanese audience hasn't seen those either since the game didn't make much of a splash there. I wonder how the Japanese audience will react to the new endings. It's probably going to be one of the reasons the game flops a second time. First it had all the balance issues (which made the arcade version flop too), now they've worked to fix those they introduce other downsides that may matter more to them... Oh well... Lol @ the glimpse of the Morrigan ending though. It looks like they've censored her boobs having her always hide them, which is totally unlike her.

It looks like the surprise wasn't statuettes but a glimpse of the stop motion commercial. Do they really think this will make it sell?!