There are ultra-portable PC laptops that don't have an optical drive, but I think it's a bad idea. You never know when you might need it, and so you have to lug around the external optical drive, just in case. That really defeats the purpose of a portable computer.
True, you could save a lot of weight and space this way, but many people use it for ripping CDs, watching DVDs, making backups, etc., that it's just not doable. And I don't think that it will become redundant soon (like the floppy disk), as the form factor seems to be rather stable with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, only the capacity increases.
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