There is nothing that makes SSDs with power loss protection inherently expensive. As always, it's just market segmentation...
A large supercap in the 100-200mF range for an SSD is around $1 or $2. In fact you can implement power loss protection with less capacitance with regular tantalum caps like the Intel 320 did (http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_320_review_300gb). But drive manufacturers see the consumer market doesn't care about power loss protection, so they decide to scrap the feature, which saves a buck or two, and saves some PCB space.
That's true until your battery ages a bit and now the on-board battery monitoring is inaccurate because it thinks there's 5% or so left in power when there is none. I have more than one laptop that will just let the battery run out because the on-board diagnostics think there's juice left when there isn't any.
I think if you're selling laptops, then you should worry about these types of cases. Not to mention cases like having Windows Updates run on battery which means the laptop can't hibernate when after its started these installs at shutdown.
Standby/hibernate is still far from perfect. A fifty cent capacitor shouldn't be a dealbreaker for ssd manufacturers.
People who sell laptops want you to go and buy new laptops not just replace the battery. Why design around failed components? The answer you want is to replace the battery not fork out for an expensive ssd option that's unnecessary for 100% of the design life of the product.
A large supercap in the 100-200mF range for an SSD is around $1 or $2. In fact you can implement power loss protection with less capacitance with regular tantalum caps like the Intel 320 did (http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_320_review_300gb). But drive manufacturers see the consumer market doesn't care about power loss protection, so they decide to scrap the feature, which saves a buck or two, and saves some PCB space.