I was a little surprised when they released the Thunderbolt Display without a built-in optical drive. I fully expected them to make that into a de-facto docking

I was a little surprised when they released the Thunderbolt Display without a built-in optical drive. I fully expected them to make that into a de-facto docking station and drop the drive from all portables and the Mac Mini (they did so on the latter) - a slimline drive and controller would have added very little cost considering the Thunderbolt electronics (i.e. a PCIe bus) are already in there anyway. But then the whole Thunderbolt thing really hasn't taken off - I suspect Intel is artificially keeping the bridge chips' away from general availability to keep prices high. Which has resulted in a rather lacklustre product line-up one year after launch.