I'm not sure I agree here; a lot of consumer cases that I've worked with are just barely deep enough to house a card of this size. Putting the power connector on the end of the card would add some extra room to make the case slimmer perhaps, but most consumer cases tend to be generously wide, while not having a lot of extra depth. Wires plugging into the end of the card would compete with the hard drive / CD ROM / Media Card Bay, etc etc.
I agree with nVidia's choice here, but you also raise a valid point; certain cases and configurations would benefit from the added flexibility of that adapter, so there may well be a market.
I had an Antec case (solo or sonata or something like that) where I had to cut into the drive bays with tin snips to fit a 1080ti. Modern cases have more room for GPUs.
I agree with nVidia's choice here, but you also raise a valid point; certain cases and configurations would benefit from the added flexibility of that adapter, so there may well be a market.