The equatorial wedge is an optional item. Meade does not include it with the scope. I wanted to automatically reduce all my CCD images and matching a rotating field did not excite me in the least. I think the field rotator Meade makes will be very heavy and take up a lot of room behind the scope. Its made for the 16 inch scope.
Life is a lot easier equatorially, especially with a small scope.
The mount is quite stable with the 8 inch. Anything bigger and you may want to investigate other mounts. A nice feature of the mount it that you can remove the scope from the mount and then put it back on with just three screws. Polar alignment is not changed when this is done. I have removed the scope from the mount three times and have never had to repeat polar alignment.