Found this on IGN, so I thought to share and see what you guys think.
Team Meat brings up some interesting arguments, what resonated most with me was:

"But there's also the argument that piracy as a sampling tool drives gamers towards the benefits of actual ownership. "Steam knows what it's doing," says McMillen. "It hits the piracy demographic of people who download loads of stuff but when something is on sale they'll buy it because they want to have it to own on Steam for achievements or for leader boards or for social whatever."

It kind of paints me, GOG is another way to finally own all the stuff I played as a kid.

Edit: forgot the linky http://pc.ign.com/articles/118/1184546p1.html

Yea, 'right'.

Joining in gog and summer sales in many places took me from a wrong path of pirating.

Edit: Or should I say that witcher 1 did that. Because of that I joined in here to buy sequel.
And now we are here.. Clean as a old womans toilet.

That's not proving that piracy is good, only that you might be able to convince people who are used to piracy to abandon the dark side if you give them the proper treatment. Apparantly good service, acceptable prices and community spirit work better than horrible DRM and threats of punishment, at least as far as the average joe is concerned.

Which is what Steam does not offer. :D

I don't know how piracy is driving somebody towards ownership. If it's only for the download experience than I recommend using windows update after installation from a two year old windows 7 cd.

Piracy itself is kind of not buying and not owning games. And the sales of Steam are sometimes great, but other places have also sales. It's not like you can get every game cheap. But it's true that the lower the price the less piracy will occur, but profits might fall nevertheless. And some people will never buy if they have a choice.

The achievements and leader boards, ... actually might persuade some people to buy games instead of pirating them.

Since I don't care about any of it, piracy would suit me better. Except that it's evil.

Prepare to have your entire account banned if something like a chargeback or a paypal screwup happens.
Also glad to hear you like $=€.
Finally... the less said about the Steam forums the better. :P

What Steam forums?

Well, I never said I was a fan of Steam, I was more thinking about GOG here, since the owner mentioned it. But Steam does have some acceptable prices during sales and they have a fanboy community and achievements and stuff that obviously are good reasons for some gamers to join them (regardless if we agree with them or not).

And as DodoGeo said, they remove the need to patch your games manually (whether you think it's a good thing or not, it is without a doubt a special service.) You may not like them but if their service didn't appeal to gamers, they wouldn't be so successful.

Guess who got a refund from Steam? :P

you will never hear the word "steam is decent" from some people around here, just to find out who just say steam is good :D
ya i admit i bought top gun on steam for the achievements lol just look at them :D although the game failed hard..........

Yeah. Thanks for that, Meat. Real heartwarming.

Me too. :-)

Yes, people are too eager to bash Steam. The point of that interview was "digital distribution" and Steam was named as it is the biggest player there. It was also taken as an example because Super Meatboy was first released there.