@AidBand - There's a good video located here;
http://gdcvault.com/play/1021934/Divinity-Original-Sin-Postmortem-Success (sfw), that describes why the physical copies required steam to install and such (it also describes a lot of other things too).
Basically, Larian didn't want reviewers to get their hands on a 'pre-released' version of the game (which needed the day 1 patch), but they needed to get their physical copies ready to ship, so they packed the physical copies with all of the data files but not the main executable, which is what steam will download when you activate the game via steam. That made sure that reviewers downloaded the day 1 patch before being able to review the game.
I don't think that Physical copies of D:OS:EE will suffer from the same clause though, but that's just my opinion.
I hope I explained that right.
