I think there is a lot of wishful thinking going on with the price of the battery.
I couldn't find the article but read on one for the green car blogs last month that the price of lithium is up 30%.
In addition, ford is easing into EV's and one reason for that is the battery price.
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1075486_2012-ford-focus-battery-pack-cost-12-15000-says-ceo
I can totally understand why Nissan is not releasing the cost and price of the battery. In the near term it might be just to expensive to make sense to replace. I for one don't care so much. I plan to upgrade to a car with a bigger battery ASAP and if for some reason, I can't sell my Leaf for a good price, I'll keep it for an around town car and drive it into the ground. Or hopefully upgrade to some aftermarket cells in the future form Nissan, Tesla/Panasonic, Enginer, or some newcomer.
We would all prefer to know, however, I think we are too worried about the battery price. This in not a cell phone battery. The should design these to upgrade though and Andy said that is their plan.
For me the most important thing is that they provide detailed linegraph estimates to people that are in hot climates which show the yearly degradation estimate of the battery in relation to heat, yearly miles, averqge speed driven and time. Provide this data with a correlation to range estimates over time as well if possible. That last one might be too tricky though. I don't blame them for not giving us this data before because they didn't have it. Now they are getting close to 2 years of real world data which is way better than their previous estimates based on accelerated testing.
As I said before, a path to upgrade would be a great goodwill gesture. As a few others said, offering to sell battery capacity insurance or the option to buy replacement plan like tesla offered with the roadster are other great goodwill ideas.
Now leasing is only 200 a month for 2 years which is a great option for those looking to buy a leaf for the first time or for those wishing to trade in the leaf they currently own to releive battery degradation fears.