It's out of the realm of what's possible that Nintendo will sell the WiiU without the gamepad. It's like if the Wii were launched without the wiimote.

Not a chance in hell.

And the games also look too expensive to be true.

That's just a placeholder price - it's the highest possible price Nintendo will charge for hardware and software. Amazon has had that price for months now. It's really just to avoid lower-than-actual-price preorders. 

Basically no one knows the price. Nintendo will announce the price next week and that will be plenty of time for retailers to calculate potential demand and work things out with Nintendo. Apparently Nintendo told retailers it won't be higher than $349 and $69 for software which is why some retailers go as low as those prices but not lower - you can't take preorders and later tell your customers that the price of the product increased. All we (and retailers!) know is it won't be higher than $349 / $69 (same in €) the rest is pure speculation by retailers and media. 

This.

Bear in mind that Nintendo is saving every penny atm. They didn't include the charger in the 3DS XL on the grounds that there were plenty of compatible DSi chargers out there. They could very well have the same reasoning telling that there are plenty of Wiimotes out there to make the WiiU work. But again, I seriously doubt the whole multiple SKUs thing.  

But the thing is that wiimotes aren't the controllers of the console. They are supported but not the main controller.

The gamePad is. That's why they won't release the console without it.

Not gonna happen.

Nintendo designs their consoles around software that they envison, and WiiU is being marketed with the screen controller principle in mind.  There's no way they are going to fragment the userbase; they will make sure that every WiiU owner has this functionality out of the box for the sake of this design philosophy.

Personally, I think multiple SKUs is a possibility, but definitely not one without a WiiU Gamepad.