May be bikeshed/feature creep. Marking for review.

It's interesting to note that jQuery UI Widget actually triggers a "remove" event, so it's not such a unique requirement.

It's also not likely to require much code to implement.

http://jsfiddle.net/rwaldron/YzktP/

retargeted to 1.5

Use rwaldron's code and only pay the size/performance penalty when needed.

Yeah, I don't think that this is something that jQuery can reasonably implement without causing performance problems for many applications. (And even if it's limited to only those applications that ask for remove - it will be quite slow.)

Just to provide some details in case this ticket is ever referenced in the future:

jQuery UI does not fully trigger an event on remove. We use .triggerHandler() for performance and to ease implementation (we never have to check event.target since there's no bubbling).

rwaldron's solution isn't sufficient since elements are removed in many ways that don't go through .remove(). For example, .html( "" ) will remove all descendants.

jQuery core probably shouldn't provide a single DOM mutation event without providing all reasonable mutation events. There are obvious use cases where remove is useful on its own, but I'm not sure that even if there weren't performance issues that jQuery should implement just remove.

To clarify, that fiddle was not intended to be a proposed core implementation, just a "plugin" to satisfy the OP