Ceric, I think you and your wife need a rule in the house for where the remote goes.
So do these people that don't buy a Wii because of the TV connection tomfoolery own a DVD player or have digital cable or at some point in their lives owned a VCR? That's the same barrier. To accept one but not the other is unreasonable.
But then I never felt anyone TRULY was confused by normal videogame controllers, they were just being stubborn. If you can drive a car you can use a twin analog stick controller. They DECIDED it was confusing and refused to try. My attitude is usually if you're going to be unreasonable then you don't get to participate. Sorry, this minor amount of effort is required to play videogames and if you refuse to try, we're not including you. But I understand how from a business perspective Nintendo figured it was a good idea to cater to these people.
Still if I, who is willing to go through the miniscule amount of effort required to operate a console controller and figure out how to turn my videogame system on, has to pay extra for such a feature, that's kind of bullshit. Why should I have to subsidize people that I feel are completely unreasonable in their REFUSAL to learn something that would take them literally one minute to figure out if they just put the slightest effort into it?
This is what pissed me off about the Wii. Here I had been a loyal customer for over ten years and I had to compromise this and that and this and that to accomodate people that didn't give a **** and had never made the slightest effort to even try to give videogames a chance. If I have to pay for expensive screen controllers this time around, well they better provide something substantial and not just be some meaningless gimmick that appeals to casuals.
This is why videogame systems don't come with dance pads and guitar controllers. Those have such limited functionality that it makes no sense for them to raise the cost of the base system. Every thing included on that standard controller should be something you NEED, as in the vast majority of games absolutely require them. And shoehorning to create artifical need does not count.