Arr! Copyright infringers be ruining the good pirate name!

This is why I don't wear my pirate hat in public!!
But yeah; I haven't pirated for a good year or two now. I don't need to now I have GOG.
I do, however, crack retail games that require a CD check (or Steamworks as of DoW2). This is only because if I don't, I end up ruining the CDs! So I make it a point to remove the CD requirement and leave the CD in its case.

Agreed. It seems to miss the big issues, and focus on smaller/non-issues.
3rd Party DRM is a big issue, but the article gets it all wrong. It claims Steam Piracy is a non-issue, which is untrue. It says that they highlight the DRM, but this is mostly untrue or late.
How to fix steam:
(a) Allow refunds for non-downloaded games. (no brainer)
(b) Allow gifting of additional copies. (no brainer)
(c) If you have to use 3rd party DRM make sure it's CLEARLY listed on the page, and that the information is on there when the game appears on steam, not 2 weeks later because everyone complained in the forums.
(d) Get rid of regional restrictions. (this one is probably personal to me, but it's the most annoying one)
(e) Get more support staff. have some of them work holidays, nights, weekends. (no brainer)
(f) If you lock someone's account, immediately send them an email telling them WHY, and what to do next.
(g) Don't have T&C that allows you to take away every game based on your whims (even if they don't). Make clear, limited situations where that is applicable. (ie: hacking, cheating, theft, but not complaining to your credit card company).
(h) Trade ins would be nice, if only for limited steam credits.

Agreed accept regional restrictions. The reason being that it effectively bans any game from the DD store that is banned somewhere in the world. Regional restrictions ensure that we don't all wind up being force fed diluted copies of games or indeed, left with no game at all.
Yes I know publishers 'abuse' that feature for reasons that will never make sense to anyone with more than half a brain. But that's a problem that you cannot circumvent while retarded publishers remain a part of the equation.
However, one thing that has to go is regional pricing.
One thing that I think would benefit all DD sites (including this one), especially those that allow gifting, is to provide means for people to record the list of games they have purchased elsewhere. I'd imagine though that GOG's user pages are very much a part of why the site's still in beta though. Alternatively making wish lists public may also serve that purpose (but without allowing people to show off their collections).

My point was more that if GOG becomes a big success in it's niche, then it will prove that you can survive without using DRM. This may make other distributors consider drm-free downloads/retail, and snowball into the death of DRM forever.
Considering that all games available on GOG will have been available to those who want to pirate for years, their success will show that people are willing to pay for a good product at a good price despite the illegal alternative being free.

But there's a huge difference between sales in the first few weeks of release and sales several years later. That's regardless of piracy. So no matter what GOG achieves it won't have a knock on effect by itself.

Making publishers 'freeing' up their game from DRM after a few years is a noble enough endeavor for me.

Steam would be much better if it used less RAM and wasn't so ugly. The sharp lines and hideous colors are an unwelcome throwback to Windows 95. Green and gray? What the hell were they thinking?

You can change the colour schemes quite easily in settings. I do like the Ice scheme I'm using now. I check how much RAM steam is running when playing a game or booting it up, in my case, it's nominal and does not slow my system/game performance down at all. You might need to seek out what is causing the RAM to be eaten up.
About the article in question, what I totally agree with is regional pricing, it should be one away with completely, not to mention that some regions have games not available in others. But this has become less of an issue. But what is downright stupid is region locking, which when dealing with a global market, needs to be elimimated. DRM is here to stay, but steam offers, for me, a hell of a lot of games I haven't played that are DRM free, enough to keep me happy for years. The death or DRM can't come soon enough.
I love steam a lot the way it is now, sure download speeds remaining high during sales periods would be fantastic, but it's a service used by millions all around the world. Sadly, a high server load is to be expected, especially with some of the deals they had on which very likely sold extremely well, thus straining the servers. I did buy games during the sales period, but had the good sense to download them after the craze had died down, opting to play the ones I have not finished yet.
I might sound like a steam fanboy, but that's simply because the service it offers is, by and large, excellent. I don't buy games anywhere else for my ageing laptop except from GOG an steam. The fact it's being offered on a platform that has, frustratingly, been marginalised and shunned by a large proportion of the game industry over the recent years is something else.
It's because of services like GOG.com and steam that has made me into a avid pc gamer, choosing to leave my PS3 controller for better game experiences. I do know there are many others like me, at that's good for PC gaming as a whole, as more (possibly) fantastic game will be made or ported to it.
I hope people, despite, (possibly), disagreeing with my other statements at least agree with me on the last one.
Steam can be improved, but it shows how good it currently is when one of the main gripes with it is slow download speed during a massive sales period

For those complaining about regional pricing, complain to the publishers. It isn't a coincidence that pretty much all of the major online outlets have a regional pricing model...the publishers want it that way.

"It's yours, tied to your account and locked down until the end of Steam."
Fixed.

While it's true that you can easily change the color scheme, Steam still looks like it's from another planet. Maybe I'm just picky, but if Steam is just running as a background process, it shouldn't use more than 5 megs of RAM (instead of 30 or so). And I still think it looks ungodly ugly.

Yeah, but D2D sells the Jedi Knight pack but it's only in the US/Canada but on Steam the same pack is sold internationally.

Most people don't even know how to accurately find out how much ram Steam alone is using. I don't even know if by default task manger is setup to do so, or if you can even use the task manager pre-vista to find out.
There is also a lot of misunderstanding on how Windows handles memory so you end up with all these urban myths about disabling page files, running ram defraggers, or programs to "clean out" ram.
Considering the client does much more than list games (servers, friends, IM, voice, overlay, browser) I would say the client is pretty slim. Compared to another big digital store client (itunes), it is definitely much better.
This is just speculation but I think this might also be why the client is so plain looking. Staying away from the default Windows widgets may allow it to keep a lower memory footprint. Could also have to do with the overlay not looking horrible at different game resolutions like Xfire and GFWL.
Anyway, it appears the vast majority of Steam users have 2GB+ right now.
When it comes to background apps I watch the CPU time being used.