No, it's not really increasing the role of a publisher into a real developer, at least not very often. The publisher just hires another developer firm to do the porting and thus they remain largely a administrative organization. Like Halo; Bungie developed, Microsoft published, and Gearbox ported. I agree with your second point, all game projects (smaller projects, 2-6 people involved) I've been involved in have had development teams that consist of people that both fit into the 'designer' category and hardware specialist. Indeed in this day and age with radically different platforms and controllers, quiet a few key game designers have to be able (again, small teams) to adapt either the game design to the platform, or adapt the hardware to the game.

It was only the number 11 which was changed, there are lots of numbers starting with say 15, 19 and so on.