Whoops. Somehow I missed the compiler in use
Well, GCC also has a runtime lib you need, so..
And yeah, there will probably be sound, graphics and more shipped as well, so why worry about a few libraries?
Also, once you've got your build system set up to automatically gather up the dependencies and create the installer/package, it really doesn't matter if there is 1 file or 1000; it just becomes a "make installer" (or similar) command (preferably done automatically by your CI system).
On the other hand; if you are building everything by hand and manually copying files around, then I can see how 14 extra dlls could be annoying. But why would you do that? And in any case, the solution to that is to stop and start using a proper build and CI system and the whole issue just goes away.
It's so nice to have SCons rules to compile and build packages on multiple platforms and then have buildbot do a build, run unit tests and build packages on all supported platforms and then archive the results every time you do a commit. Doesn't take long to set up but really saves time and worry in the long run
(I like such a setup at least).
Edit: another argument against statically linking everything is when you have to ship updates. Sure, you can just re-ship the whole thing or use binary diff's. But it's so much easier to just ship a few updated files (out of the many in total) and you can still use bdiffs for those if you like.