Hell, I would go as far as saying that even a cd key is too much. How many times have you bought a new pc game, installed it, played it for a while, threw it on your cd spindle and then forgot about it, uninstalled the game to make room for the next big game, and finally got back to the game only to realize that you threw away the case and now can't play the game you paid for? I'll just tell you that it sucks.
And on that note, I'll get to the whole 'limited installs' concept. I generally have about 3 or 4 games installed on my pc at any given time. I don't know about you, but every once and a while I have the urge to play torment, or baldurs gate 2, or any number of classic other games that I have installed numerous times depending on my mood. Now I bought each of these games brand new and have EVERY right to do exactly that, install when I want to play them and uninstall them when I need some space. I should not NEED to pay extra for doing exactly what is common sense to do. We are not renting the right to install the game, we are purchasing the game to do exactly what we want with it. If we want to install it on our desktop and our laptop, it's our game so we should be able to do exactly that!
Now I don't pirate games myself, but I'm sure gonna cheer for the pirates for sticking up for gamers rights. That's right, it's our RIGHT to play an offline game without an internet connection. Why should we, as gamers, have to get an inferior product because the publisher wants to remove content to make it harder to pirate? If they refuse to listen to our opinion on this matter, it's only justice that they get hit where it hurts the most. We are their customers and if they don't listen to what we say, they don't deserve to stay in business.