I was slightly annoyed by that at first, but after thinking about it I now reckon it's much better without one, anything that reduces the time it takes to start playing a game / pissing about with the channels has to be a good thing.
And from what I can gather from various vids that are now appearing online, initial load times on Wii are quite a bit longer than those on the GCN, so not having a system intro helps speed up the process. Admittedly it's only by a few seconds but hey, every second counts!
Those look like rubber feet, for if you position your Wii horizontally.