Agreed. The GameGear was a hunk of crap. The battery life on the thing was maybe two hours, the screen was backlit, so all of the colors bled together and it was bigger than the original GameBoy by quite a large margin. It was a pain in the ass to carry around, you couldn't actually see what you were playing and you could only play in short bursts unless you carried around an ammo belt full of batteries on you at all times.
On top of that, the games sucked.

And what do you mean "taken long enough"? Nintendo released the Gameboy Advance three years ago, and it's twice as powerful as the GameGear was. Had you said that back in 2001, you might have had a point.