Ok look, since you obvoiusly haven't thought about this, let me teach you something.
Rechargeable packs are good in the short run. And by short run, I mean about 6 months.
After that, regardless of how you've taken care of it, charged it, used it, etc, it WILL begin to lose charge capacity. Case in point - my cell phone has gone from having a charge that could run for 2-3 weeks with 10 minutes of talking a day to one that goes dead within 2 days. Even my DS is having issues - I've noticed at least a 30-40% drop.
The batteries will die after a while, and chances are good that Nintendo would have made it against your warranty to open up the Wiimote and change them out. Which means in a few years, you'd need to drop $40 bucks on an entire new controller because yours is going dead. (Apple is always in trouble for this sort of thing.)
Not to mention they'd factor that into the price of both the system bundle AND the Wiimote itself. I'm guessing it would add 10 bucks to the system and 15 minimum to the Wiimote standalone.
THEN they'd need to include a way to charge it - either a straight DC input OR some sort of charging cradle. That's another cost that would add in both instances.
SO instead of having people bitch about something like that, they released it to use batteries, just like the Wavebird, which NO ONE complains about because the battery life kicks ass. I'm guessing 60 hours is a HUGELY conservative estimate, especially when the WB is quoted at 100 hours and I never seem to have to change them but once a year (and even then I just recharge my rechargeables).
Finally, what would you rather do - change out the batteries, or have to wait 90 minutes to have it recharge while you were in the middle of beating Metroid Prime 3?
Just get rechargeables. They are cheap, they last forever, they do the job, you can have backups available, you can replace and change them yourself, they are environmentally friendly, and you can use them in all sorts of things like Wavebirds, plug-n-play systems, etc.
So just do it and shut up. This is useless whining that has a totally viable solution, ESPECIALLY when the alternative was a LOT MORE bitching had the price been increased (which it would have easily).
You want rechargeable ones you can mess with yourself. And if you think about it for more than 20 seconds of knee jerk reaction, you'll understand.