as selfless and noble as that sounds, i tend to not believe it
. but i'll play along: if i were to believe it, there's only one problem: it doesn't really work, because to come out with a product which your userbase is not able to "consume" is simply misguided, and potentially deadly if you're small enough. developing a 35mm slr and marketing it at the current price, at which the vast majority won't buy, is something pentax probably can't afford, especially when that is likely to be at the detriment of their aps-c flagship: so you end up in a situation where your "bread and butter" aps-c is no longer "competitive" (as we're so used to it being: great bang for the buck, great image quality, etc), and you also have an upper market 35mm dslr for which your consumers are not ready, and for the most part cant or wont buy, that spells trouble, to say the least, _that_ is "doom and gloom". my rough estimate is that pentax is not realistically safe to release a 35mm dslr before 1. they can sell it comfortably at around 1k bucks (i'm not talking about release price, but about "that" price which settles after a few months, see k5's price history) and 2. they have a solid lens lineup for it. I'm afraid 1 is still far, despite the pipe-dream rumors of "cheap" full frames from the big two (cheap will likely mean just bellow 2k, if that low)
i like pentax myself, and i'd hate to see them go, i have very good reasons to prefer them over "the others". this is why i'm glad they have been wise enough not to plunge into the 35mm madness before the time is right. and the time is yet not right, imho.
and btw, no, pro market won't be penetrated through the existence of one 35mm body, it takes a lot more than that, and a lot of very different things. 35mm is almost irrelevant, i think, in fact. so no salvation would come from there (not to mention pro market is probably infinitesimal for even the big two, and they are said to dominate it).
again, having a 35mm dslr has nothing to do with up to date, in the same way honda doesn't need to sell trucks just because ford sells the transit, and as to relevant, i guess it's obvious: if the brands consumers won't buy it, that's definitely not relevant. Just giving the "brand fanatics" "bragging rights" (because "there's a full frame, now") does not qualify as relevant.
i'd love to be proven wrong, and see a 35mm pentax released at photokina at say a 1300 bucks release price (or maybe even a bit higher, at release), though i feel that's unlikely, but i'd really hate to be proven "wrong" by a release around the 2k mark, and than be proven right by the unavoidable crash caused by it