This is what I've been expecting. I used to think I was unique, but looking at the forums, I realize there's a whole cadre of people who buy MacBook Pros, take out the optical drive, and replace it with an SSD, so they run with both an SSD and a hard drive. The SSD runs the OS and has your code and apps on it, the hard drive has your Big Media.

I hope, when Apple gives up the optical media drive, they will still continue to have a hard drive slot.

I'd much rather just buy the machine configured this way from Apple than have to rework the internals of my laptop (And undo everything if I have to take the machine in for support.)