Dang, I love racing games. I already have TOCA 3, as well as CMR 2005, as well as MotorStorm on PS3. This would be a steal, but I don't think I'll get through all of my other racing games to get to this.
I'll hold out for NFS Shift on PS3 and of course GT5.
But still, dang.

Please grow a backbone.

So if you like GOG and you buy games from GOG and you express your positive experience and want to share it with others you are part of a fanatical GOG cult?
Wow.

Yes in some circumstances it would depending on how excessively stated and uncritical said opinion was.

While Star Wolves 3 is on sale for 50% + off don't get it. That game is horrible to say the least. Only time I enjoyed it was when I saw the final uninstallation screen.
Flawed interface, even when you tell your ships to attack they just sit there and turn so slowly they get turned into dust from the other 3 fighters shooting them. Even if you click a ship to move somewhere half the time it does nothing, as if your click doesn't count. It's more frustrating to play than anything I have tried in recent memory, and am promptly asking for my money back. F-ck that game.
This is a warning, don't fall for the sale. Waste of money.

The problem here is that Valve (and possibly Codemasters) knew they going to hold this sale. And unlike your B&M example, they most certainly could have requested additional kyes well in advance of their planned sale.
As others have said, this is not the first time (nor the second, third or fourth....) that this has happened on Steam. They know the score, they could have avoided it.
And again, unlike your B&M example, they should not have that lengthy a wait for additional keys, the only shipping involved there would by via whatever method they get the numbers into their database. There's certainly no waiting on some delivery guy to hand deliver the goods.
Plus, chances are that the regional restrictions still apply. Since there are different distributors for each region, it is quite reasonable to assume that there would be different people who get paid for the keys.
CodeMasters handle all of their releases on Steam and release worldwide (they might by hugely delayed by Valve for some regions, but there are no other publishers involved).
As for a sale, GamersGate are price matching the Steam sale for Flotilla, offering it at 10% off.
In fact, GamersGate seem to be doing a lot of price matching these days.

Steam eats babies but GoG saves babies!

Good lord boys...start a thread where you can all whip em out, measure and declare a winner for Chrissakes.
As for running out of keys, it happens. Trying to dress it up as some conspiracy to prove "See? They don't care!" is pretty ridiculous, though. It happened, someone screwed up, it'll get fixed. Nothing more, nothing less.

Thanks to the superior service at GoG you never have to wait for a key here.

You must contact support to get a serial for some games on GOG.com. :)

Most (if not all?) of those serials are needed only for multiplayer games, AFAIK. You can play the single-player portion of those games without a serial number.

You can play FUEL without the serial number too for single player. You don't need to log in GFWL to play. :) I am talking retail version of the FUEL BTW.
So this things can be happened, just wait and Valve will fix this. This happened for Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl, CoH and Stalker: Clear Sky too in the past on Steam and they fixed them quickly.

If I want to pick up one cheap codemasters racing game, what would people recommend?
I was interested in FUEL, because I like open world games, but i'm not sure my laptop is good enough to handle it, it has GFWL and securom, and it seems to have no keys. So I might just skip it. I think GRID might kill my laptop too.
That means Dirt 1 or Toca3.
Both seem to have a lot of content, and be well regarded games. I'm not really a hardcore racing game person. I enjoyed Colin McRae 1&2. I quite like the idea of all the different modes in Toca.
Any recommendations?

All the Codie games on sale are great. Out of your two choices I would say Dirt but it runs on the same engine as Grid so it might also be an issue with your laptop. Both are really good games though.

It all depends on what your laptop is...
Toca 3 is the older title and should run fine on the majority of the laptops released over the last couple of years without a single problem.
Dirt 1 is more demanding by far.
If you enjoyed CMcR 1 and 2, I doubt you will be satisfied with either game if you are looking to play a dedicated WRC career...
What I suggest is get Xpand Rally, a better accurate Rally experience.
If you don't really care for Rally, then I believe Toca 3 is the better game (Dirt).