I would submit, for argument's sake, that as usual Apple is a few years late to the idea, but still ahead of most consumers. See: Hybrid hard drives.

To clarify, I've been actively pushing the death of the DVD (and all optical media in general) for .... four years now? More? It's supremely inefficient in terms of storage per area and when you can buy almost the equivalent of 750 DVDs (3 Tb/4 Gb) in a single drive there's no reason to store data and ESPECIALLY no reason to actively archive things to DVD like in the past.

For example, I buy ALL my music online in no-DRM mp3 (emusic.com) and archive it both on my local cloud and via google music. TV/Movies.... I don't want to get into that argument here but suffice it to say I have some on HD and in a stack of DVDs and there's a tenuous relationship between the two. And I won't get into the problems with copy-protection. Software is almost all bought online lately, including my last OS install of Win7. Almost everything you want to get can be found online, and in the very rare case you CAN'T find something, you really only need one networked optical drive across all of your devices, which we have if necessary.

But no, new machines really don't need any optical media and I really hope that we'll start to see the "network DVD drive" replace the built-in and become an "if you need it" accessory rather than a "you'll almost never need this but...".