A lot of companies used to do that, part of the reason I prefered to buy the boxed game over a digital version - these days you'll be lucky if your box includes anything beyond a sheet that shows the layout of your keyboard with all the hotkeys... :-\Ah well, at least it's better for the trees....
Yeah, but there's no excuse for not putting all of that data onto a disk, or at least making it possible to access from within the game. I very rarely play anything at fullscreen, but I know a lot of people do. And they don't want to have to tab out all the time to open a resource-hog browser to get some background info. Some games will crash from even trying it, and some computers will hang for 10 minutes. All of that should be easily accessible from within the game, even if that means the game having to grab it from a web server.
