The good news is that there's still a lot of juice left in the Kepler data set. Only about half the data has been analyzed, and a lot of good stuff will come ou

The good news is that there's still a lot of juice left in the Kepler data set. Only about half the data has been analyzed, and a lot of good stuff will come out of the rest. Also, it takes 3 observations of a transit for planetary confirmation, but not all 3 observations need to be made by Kepler. With only 2 transits having been observed it'll be easy to extrapolate future potential transit dates. Ground based observatories can then do targeted observations of the most promising candidates and fill in that data, essentially moving a lot of observations from the "candidate" planet category into confirmed territory for a comparatively minimal effort.