chscag took the words right out of my mouth (well, keyboard). Somewhere at OWC there is a guy who's ONLY job it is is to reverse-engineer the special connector that the MBPR uses for its optical drives. I have great confidence on that front.
As for the rest of the MBPR, yes a lot of it is less "tinkerable" than previous models. This is because:
a. The batteries have reached a point (at least on Apple's machines) where they won't need to be replaced in the normal lifecycle (five years). We've had this battery tech around for a while now, and Apple has the stats on how often they've had to replace a battery. Evidently they feel good about that figure.
b. User habits are really changing (something us older "power users" may not be noticing). I often use this example but it's the truth -- my wife (who is younger than I am) has almost NOTHING other than some songs and photos to back up. Everything she does with her computer (admittedly not as extensive a range of uses as I have, but much more typical of normal users) is on Facebook or the cloud or Flickr or something like that. So for those younger users, SSDs are preferred for the boot drive, with external media libraries and everyday stuff mostly stored in the cloud. Very different to me, but also very typical of younger users I've observed.
c. Current LED LCD technology has a MUCH lower point of failure, and again should reasonably be expected to last the life of the machine generally. I'm not bothered by this at all, particularly not with AppleCare. The laptop screen has always been the single most expensive part to replace, and it continues to be the part I've never had to replace (part of that may be due to my tendency to really baby my notebooks, remembering how expensive they are to fix). So it continues to be from my POV a non-issue, since the later technology is demonstrably more reliable than the fluorescent technology we used to use. There will be some exceptions, but broadly speaking these parts are getting better in every way.
d. I'll happily agree with anyone who wants to moan about it that the un-upgradable RAM was a bad idea. Sign me up for that. You can be sure I'll let Apple know that I thought it was a bad idea, too. Hopefully if everyone does that, they'll reconsider that aspect. Sixty-four bit computing works best with HUGE amounts of RAM, so deliberately limiting people to a (five years from now) very paltry 8GB (oops -- my bad -- 16GB not as paltry, but again who knows where we'll be in five years?) is just not cool.
Luckily, Apple has a fix for almost all of this: the regular MacBook Pro line.