We've known this for more than a year now...

Settle down there Beavis; nobody said anything about removing any part of a console just because it's the most expensive part.

The hard drive just happens to be the one component that is not only user upgradable, but would also be the one component most users absolutely WILL end up upgrading, assuming the console is seeing heavy usage.

Other than for the purpose of installs, which benefit developers moreso than consumers (history shows all that consumers did in regards to installs is complain loudly) the primary purpose of that memory would be for game saves and small DD games. Full game downloads don't appear to be in the cards for the Wii U based upon the design decision.

I'm really not sure what the outrage is considering that the Xbox 360 set the precidence with the EXACT SAME setup.

If there were any legitimate gripe, it should be that the console (presumably) does not have any sort of fast ESATA internal port in which to install any 2.5" HDD. For all anyone knows, the final console may end up being USB 3.0 compatible, which would be more than adequate for installs, DLC, full game downloads, etc.

Alright, so here's a question for you: would you rather pay $399 for a Wii U with a 320 or maybe even 250GB HDD, or $299 and the option to use any HDD, inducing any HDD you may already own? 

For $100, I'd probably take a 1TB HDD minimum, and likely never have to think about upgrading for the life cycle of the console.

it's internal storage... sounds like its for system updates not game saves.

I'm extremely confident that that one UPad is coming with the system.

WTF? Nintendo hate is really blinding. You can twist something good into bad.

For game saves and virtual console games, that'll be fine. Hopefully it makes third parties keep their mandatory patches small, too, and then if you really want to buy into DLC-heavy games or downloadable retail stuff, cheap options are easy to come by

7 Gigs for Black Ops DLC? Someone's getting taken for a ride...

Commentary to investors seems to indicate that they are going to go for day-and-date retail-size downloads, just like what they're doing on the 3DS starting with New Super Mario Bros 2.

The more I hear about this system, the less I'm interested. 8GB is awful for a current gen console but this is supposed to be next gen. My PS3 has 80GB and it's almost full. Screw it, I'll hate for the next Xbox and Playstation 4.

the ps3 has shown me that HDD in the system will only be suffice with a 1TB drive. with the way gaming is moving, becoming a digital box for media including music, videos and games, my 320gb ps3 is 20 gigs from full, and 90% of that is all games.
so whether nintendo gives me 8gb, 160 or 500, its not going to be enough in the long haul, thus sony continued to release ps3s with bigger drives each year. There fore, being that almost every pc owner has (or should own) an external HDD, nintendo doesnt need to raise the cost on the system to provide me a HDD.