I don't see what the fuss is about here. Aside from one time installation of Steam client (if you don't already have it installed) the game would not enforce any DRM or even require for user to be online - you can play the game in Steam's offline mode. So what is so horrible about that? That some program is working in the background while you're playing? That's just silly.
I don't get what beef people have with Steam in general either. It's a great platform that gets your games automatic updates, has very high download speeds, cloud saves and many things more. And if there is ever DRM involved it is not because Valve decides to include it - it's that game's publishers\developers prerogative, Steam is just a distributon service.
