It's going to be hard to claim this is an awful new method when Windows has been doing this since XP (circa 2001). This blogger is on Windows, right?

http://www.licenturion.com/xp/fully-licensed-wpa.txt

This kind of DRM for an operating system is understandable. For a video game it is not. There are plenty of methods to implement DRM with out hardware sniffing.

Gonna disagree there. The game lets you run on 5 different hardware configurations at once. Is this really a problem?