Speaking of publisher inefficiencies, there is no way for anyone in the US to pre-order FOV. I just check with Amazon and Gamestop.
Piracy has always been a problem and will never stop. Though now it is all free instead of paying a shady person $5 for a copy of a game or movie that is normally $20 for a movie or $60 for a game.
If digital distribution didn't have a limited amount of installs, I'd go that rout. Problem is I like to upgrade my computer quite frequently often going ground up. DVD protection that just checks to see if you got a legit copy of the game in your DVD drive is much more do-able solution for me.
Now I won't mind buying a game off GOG.com since they don't use limited install copy protection.
Steam's own Steamworks DRM doesn't limit installs. Steam only limits that YOUR account as the only account that can run that particular game-key at once. You can install it on as many PC's you like, but only one copy of the game can be running at once.
A lot of the additional DRM placed in games sold by digital distributors (Steam, Impulse, D2D, etc) - additional DRM methods are requested by the 3rd party companies (either by 3rd party publishers, game dev's, or both) who want their game on the digital distributor's site. Usually, if there are additional DRM measure, they're listed on the game's page.
Example: See
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel - Steam version, which has both the standard Steamworks DRM and also Securom Internet Edition Install Limit DRM.
Impulse and D2D do sell some games that have no DRM period - a lot of the Indie ones, namely.
Example:
Direct2Drive sells A Farewell To Dragons without any DRM.
