Called it! At Least I Think I Did... · 6:40pm Feb 16th, 2013
This is what I said in my last blog:
This ties in with my idea that Alicorns aren’t born but ‘ascend’. Either because they reach a certain magical power level or something inherent to the nature of magic causes this. The story Sharing the Night comes the closest to how I see this working. Ah well, lets see how much of this survives with the season 3 finale.
To me it looked like it indeed was some kind of ascension type of thing they did in this episode (or maybe they pulled a Gandalf with the smoking scorch mark?). And they made it obvious it had to do with her growth as a person, her magic, and apparently her Link to the Elements is somehow involved.
I did get it horribly wrong on the details, no surprise there, but I'll go smug and say I sorta called it. 
However, this was really rushed as they only had 22 minutes to do this in (no surprise there). It has left us with a lot of other questions about the consequences and how this will affect every pony. But they have already said that the Season 4 premiere will be a two parter that will go into this. So I'm just going to wait patiently, but not before this:
Ah well, at least we now finally have an episode where Celestia sang. Now I want one where Luna sings!
By the way, any bets that this last part of the episode was aimed towards bronies?
"Yes! Everything's going to be just fine!"
Update:
Hoopy McGee wrote a nice blog post on this episode that is very close to what I noticed/took away from it.
A...new episode? Hmm...I wonder if YouTube has been graced with its presence yet?
835083 It's been on YouTube for almost 12 hours now: