And a sweet black ethernet cable.

As far as I know Lego Batman and Pure come with the Elite for free, meaning that the Elite costs the same bundled with those games or without them.
If that other bundle (with those 4 games) has the exact same price as the one I mentioned, buy it.
Your not paying extra for anything.

I'm in a similar situation but the free bundled games are bioshock, lego batman, halo 3 odst, forza motorsport 3, and pure (5 free games in total).

As I can trade 3 of those games in for a new 360 game I was thinking of just using those games as 'trade bait' to get alan wake. Although, I wouldn't mind having a brief go at odst so that's a plus also.

So as others have suggested...those games are FREE, make use of them by selling them or trading them in.

Only other thing I can think of is getting an arcade which presumably doesn't come with any bundled games and is cheaper but the problem is that the elite + free games offers better value for money versus the arcade.

End of long story: get the elite with bundled games and use the games as trade bait.

you can always e-bay them or put them on Amazon. In the US if you don't open them you could sell them for ~$85, which would more than pay for a new game. You might be able to get more if you take advantage of some really good trade in deals.

There aren't really any good trade in deals here in Norway and on the biggest auction sites you'll only get scraps for secondhand games. I'll be lucky to score 25NOK per game at Gamestop here since none of them are rare or out of cycle.
To whomever asked why I didn't want Halo and Forza; I want Forza 3 badly, I had my eyes on the Forza 3 package for months but it disappeared from here before christmas. And the games aren't free for the bundle with four of them, the first bundle (Lego Batman and Pure) costs 1888NOK (cool price... ) and second one costs 2188NOK, 300NOK more and includes only one game I want and three games I don't want and can't get more than scraps from by selling or trading in (trading in isn't even possible here in Norway to my knowledge). They do have a MW2 special edition bundle in select stores but I already own that on the PC and the package itself costs 2000NOK, more than the one with two games and FFXIII I already own on PS3.

I'm at a loss and will probably just wait for another bundle or something, I think its silly that you're forced to purchase the console with games. As for the Arcade; they don't sell it any more here, it failed to move any units so its been fazed out and the price of the Elite (which is the only one available in most stores) lowered instead.

When is Alan Wake releasing anyway? I'm sure there will be a bundle then, if it costs roughly the same as the MW2 bundle its a done deal! I could also go for a RE5 bundle if it comes here!

after a quick check in the VGChartz database... May 14th for Europe, which is based off of UK dates.

Good! That's not such a long wait, there's a good chance they'll release the bundle here as well!

Ebay the games that you do not want and buy the games you really want. Very likely a 360 console price cut is coming later in 2010. Hold out if you can wait for price cut in late 2010. Or jump on board and buy a 360 Elite bundle today.

I can't Ebay them, I live in Norway. Sending anything out of the country (or shipping something into) costs so much that it'll not only nullify whatever dollars I can make off of it, it'll probably end up in the red overall (you wouldn't believe the rates of mundane things such as mail over here).
I'll hold off and see if they release an Alan Wake bundle here, it seems very likely!

I recently got RROD so upgraded from my Premium to an Elite last week. As I already have a decent library of 360 games, like you I wasn't interested in any bundles. I paid £169.85 for it from ShopTo, the cheapest bundles I could find were £179.99 (like pure/lego batman), so you can find the stand alone here in the UK at a cheaper price.