Honestly, I don't see how these things would take off if they required rewiring your house just to be able to recharge them.

This is a perfectly valid sentiment, but given the realities of physics right now, I think it's inevitable.

Let's do some quick math. Essentially what we're talking about is the maximum amount of juice you can pump through a "normal plug". So this is 120 volts at a maximum of, let's say, 30 amps. If you plugged your car in, and it was perfectly efficient recharging the batteries, each hour you'd replenish 120 * 30 = 3600 watt hours of energy, or 3.6 kilowatt hours. Consulting the chart of gasoline gallon equivalents, you see that you need about 33.56 killowatt hours to equal one gallon of gasoline. So it's ten hours to get the equivalent of one gallon of gas in your car using a normal plug.

Now, if you up the voltage to 240 volts and the amperage to 70 amps, you get 16.8 kilowatt-hours from a one hour charge, which is better -- now we're up to two hours for a gallon of gas.

Now we get into "mileage". I've seen electric cars that can go 100 miles on 33.56 kilowatt hours. So for a range of 100 miles, you need to charge for two hours at 240 volts / 70 amps vs. ten hours at 120 volts and 30 amps. For some people, this is probably acceptable. For some people, they probably want the beefy charging infrastructure.