MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).
show/hide this revision's text 3 added 134 characters in body

You need to specify what limit you are talking about as the question makes no sense otherwise. The weakest natural topology to consider in this setting is pointed Gromov-Hausdorff topology. Gromov-Hausdorff convergence with two sided curvature bounds is very well understood by the theory developed by Cheeger, Fukaya and Gromov and is particularly easy in dimension 2. If collapsing occurs then the limit is either a point (can not happen if you fix volume), or a 1-dimensional manifold without boundary (so a line or a circle). The elements of the sequence in this case locally fiber over the limit with circle fibers (globally fiber over the limit if the limit is a circle).

If the limit is 2-dimensional then it's an Alexandrov space with 2-sided curvature bounds. It's a $C^{1,\alpha}$ Riemannian manifold (again without boundary). Moreover, in this case you have topological stability on larger and larger balls as $i\to\infty$. In particular if you fix a bound on diameter then you have diffeomorphism stability and the limit has the same genus as the elements of the sequence for large $i$.

Lastly note that collapsing with bounded diameter can only happen for a torus and a Klein bottle. This is immediate from Gauss-Bonnet.
show/hide this revision's text 2 added 7 characters in body

You need to specify what limit you are talking about as the question makes no sense otherwise. The weakest natural topology to consider in this setting is pointed Gromov-Hausdorff topology. Gromov-Hausdorff convergence with two sided curvature bounds is very well understood by the theory developed by Cheeger-Fukaya Cheeger, Fukaya and Gromov and is particularly easy in dimension 2. If collapsing occurs then the limit is either a point (can not happen if you fix volume), or a 1 dimensional 1-dimensional manifold without boundary (so a line or a circle). The elements of the sequence in this case locally fiber over the limit with circle fibers (globally fiber over the limit if the limit is a circle).

If the limit is 2 dimensional 2-dimensional then it's an Alexandrov space with 2-sided curvature bounds. It's a $C^{1,\alpha}$ Riemannian manifold (again without boundary). Moreover, in this case you have topological stability on larger and larger balls as $i\to\infty$. In particular if you fix a bound on diameter then you have diffeomorphism stability and the limit has the same genus as the elements of the sequence for large $i$.
show/hide this revision's text 1

You need to specify what limit you are talking about as the question makes no sense otherwise. The weakest natural topology to consider in this setting is pointed Gromov-Hausdorff topology. Gromov-Hausdorff convergence with two sided curvature bounds is very well understood by the theory developed by Cheeger-Fukaya and Gromov and is particularly easy in dimension 2. If collapsing occurs then the limit is either a point (can not happen if you fix volume), or a 1 dimensional manifold without boundary (so a line or a circle). The elements of the sequence in this case locally fiber over the limit with circle fibers (globally fiber over the limit if the limit is a circle).

If the limit is 2 dimensional then it's an Alexandrov space with 2-sided curvature bounds. It's a $C^{1,\alpha}$ Riemannian manifold (again without boundary). Moreover, in this case you have topological stability on larger and larger balls as $i\to\infty$. In particular if you fix a bound on diameter then you have diffeomorphism stability and the limit has the same genus as the elements of the sequence for large $i$.