Meh. My adapter is two feet away from my sofa. For me, it's no worse than when I have to plug in an Xbox or Playstation controller.

Direct from Nintendo! In Europe at least. Just really feel like I should have had this out of the box.

You have to plug your controller in whilst playing? Damn you must have some insane gaming sessions or poor battery power management :p

I let my pads charge whilst I'm not using the system. It's just unlike the other systems, my Wii U battery did not last long enough for even a medium gaming session and I don't have a power oulet in a convenient place for where I sit and play games right now making the battery life an issue.  It doesn't help that you can't just plug it into the console, it needs a separate power outlet for the pad.

You'll have to buy a 3rd party USB to Wii U gamepad charge cable. I did that with my 3DS.  It is dumb. They should of just used the Wii U Pro controllers stock USB charge port on the top of the gamepad.  Hoenstly the bigger battery is still small. Why isn't the battery slot using all the space betweeen the grip parts.

I feel cheated that I had to wait nine freakin months for Pikmin 3 to come out on it

better than spending my whole damn paycheck on batteries like i did for the xbox360

Seriously??? Of course the battery they sell seperatly is better than the one which is already included with the Wii U bundle!!!

meh, the $50 in annual power savings you saved since launch as opposed to using another system to game on more than made up for it. That's before even getting into online.

Also, I just have my gamepad plugged in most the time. I only unplug it when it's being passed around at a party.

I get a good 4 hours from my launch day battery.

And you can be happy that you get a better one and not the same one!!!