The entire design of the "next gen" MBP completes Apple's departure from everything Geeks expect in a laptop. Watching "The Verge" live stream, the presenter (don't remember who) said pretty specifically, "by not purchasing standard parts". If the parts aren't standard, then that pretty much locks out upgrades.

Apple is betting that most consumers don't really care if they ever open their laptop; even MBP customers. The trade off is that the laptop is now less than three-quarters of an inch thick, weighs just over four and a half pounds, and runs for most of a work day (7 hours) on a single charge. All of this with a high-performance processor and a display that you cannot get anywhere else. I know there's a lot of hyperbole thrown around, but that's pretty fucking amazing in a market with so little going on elsewhere.

I'm no great prognosticator, but Apple sure seems to be. I trust their vision for the future of computing far more than I do the armchair quarterbacks here on HN or at the tech blogs.

Agreed regarding the lock-in factor. They are not the first ones to do that though.

Edit: on a second thought, I'm not 100% sure regarding the form factor of hard drives but I once had a Lenovo that had a Lenovo-specific mount on its hard drive, making it impossible to reuse.

FWIW, it's not a complete lock-in, since you can purchase non-factory SSD upgrades from OWC: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Express