Good points. I'm not saying Apple has no right to do this - after all, nobody forced me to buy this particular Mac - I just found it annoying. I did more research and there's more to it than liability. Creating a battery design with essentially no external case or access door allowed them to put a better battery in limited space. The design of the battery also makes it last much longer with more cycles than previous designs, making dealer changeout more palatable. As I read more about it, it actually started to look like a pretty good idea.

But heck, I wanted to mess around with this thing now that it's essentially a paperweight, and I really hate doing it when there's power in the system.

Maybe they could have put the main power connector on the top of the system so you could unplug the battery from the mainboard while leaving the battery in place?