We have consumer laws at least in the UK that override anything a publisher wants to put in their eula and tos as far as being able to sell on physical goods.

The idea is for them to hear about the content, buy the game knowing they'll get some free stuff (or be missing out with the pirated version). The content is typically pirated, though, yeah. Mass Effect DLC took forever to get online, though, and with The Sims 3, it's actually less of a pain to just buy the game. Well, I think anyway.

It's not so much a matter of fault, but one of who has control and the ability to keep the game working. Personally I don't care all that much who specifically is at fault if an authentication server isn't working; all I really care about is that because of the authentication I'm not able to install the game I bought. With physical media there's always the risk of it being damaged, lost, etc, but these are things that I actually have control over, and historically I've done a pretty good job keeping the physical media I own accounted for and in working condition. People who have a propensity for making their discs look like Pacman will obviously feel differently.
Quite correct. And that's a key reason why some folks aren't too keen on the whole activation concept.

You're wrong of course. Everything gets emulated eventually.

A straw man is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic (analog cars) is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue (software DRM). The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. -wikipedia

Yep, but it's a little more difficult, but doable. Like for example, old dos games can be played well in new computers with dosbox, old windows games that's a little more difficult, there's not yet a good way, there's emulators with different degrees of success. Consoles from last gen can be emulated fairly good, in c2d computers, emulating this gen of consoles is not yet possible.

Thanks for your anecdote, but accidents do indeed happen. Personally, I've taken my original 3 CD version of Planescape: Torment & put it on a single DVD for ease of installation. I've also done the same with:
Baldur's Gate &Tales of the Sword Coast
Baldur's Gate Ii & Throne of Bhall
Icewind Dale, Heart of Winter & Trials of the Luremaster
Fallout 1 & 2 along with Fallout Tactics.
All of which I bought new. I keep the games discs in the original boxes on a shelf for display & never have to touch them.
This also has the nice effect of being able to put patches & your favorite mods on there as well.

i love this trend, DLC is great and i can always wait a year for packaged GOTY lump packages if i want it all.
This is the DRM i support and encourage. Diskchecks only and with DLC, go for full authentication. I love the new trend...
Wish they would either re-releases Mass Effect, or strip the authentication out of it after install via a patch and only require CD-Checks.

The more complex a system is the more difficult it is to emulate it. That is why there are something like 20 NES emulators capable of running almost every game ever (including unlicensed/pirate games with unusual programming) but there is only one Xbox emulator and it can only run Halo. With enough time more modern systems will become feasible; Wii emulation has already reached a relatively mature state thanks to Nintendo basically recycling the GameCube hardware and a few games are fully playable on a C2D-level system at high frame rates even with forced AA+AF (e.g. Super Smash Bros. Brawl). DirectX emulation is coming along nicely too thanks to recent improvements to VirtualBox and VMware; I was able to run Morrowind in VirtualBox with a framerate comparable to that of the real computer I had at the time of its release, and forum feedback indicates that even newer games are able to run reasonably well.
Advanced emulation inevitably comes at a price (a C2D-level CPU is the absolute minimum) but it will become more optimised and affordable as time goes by. This isn't so much of an issue for PC games, of course, because as we have seen each new version of Windows maintains a high level of compatibility despite the sweeping improvements Microsoft has made over time; I can install any random Windows 95-era game on Windows 7 64-bit and it has a fairly good chance of running properly, possibly without even needing a compatibility mode. It's not too hard to believe that current games will have the same sort of compatibility on Windows 12 or whatever.

I'm actually a little intrigued by the lack of Xbox emulators. Given how it runs pretty much standard x86 PC hardware and the OS even being based on the Windows 2000 kernel, I figure it shouldn't really be necessary to run a full emulator but should really only require a set of runtime libraries like Wine or whatever.

Look at how easy it's been for wine to work for everything. ;)

Oh. Wow. Ok, I'll bite. Show me an emulator that can emulate 100% perfectly every single game out there for the system it is emulating. Then show me the same emulator working perfectly on hardware/OS combinations created at least a decade after the emulator was written.

Let's be a little more specific & a little less wild goose chase, shall we? How about you show me a DOS game that doesn't emulate under DosBox & isn't failing because of DRM?

Perhaps you should re-read this thread. Especially post 32: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/mass_effect_2_drm_revelead/perm=32/#p_b_32
I'll bring attention to this comment:
You think that is BS? I love Star Crusader for my 486 (came on a disc with Dark Forces and Sim City 2k :p), but I can't play it without plugging in my 486. Why? Because the disc check is too sophisticated for DOSBox to emulate to the point of letting it realize I have the damned disc in the drive (and I can't find a crack...).
Yes it's under Dos Box, but unless you name other widely used emulators to emulate DOS, that's all there is to go on. Running a virtual machine with a DOS installation isn't going to work for any game that requires hardware not emulated -- so if it needs more than basic graphics, it isn't going to work.
Now, stop trying to pass the buck. The challenge was issued to you, can you prove it, or not?

No, because there are literally millions of games & I'm not going to jump thru hoops for your silly little challenge. BTW, Star Crusader is failing because of DRM.
BTW, Hardware or OS with near 100% emulation:
NES, SMS, Collecovision, Atari ST, 2600 & 5200, Commodore 64, Amaiga, SNES (via multiple emulators) Genesis (via multiple emulators), Mac OS Classic, Windows 3.1, 95, 98.