To be fair, Steam had a lot of problems back in 2004, many of which have since been fixed :-

Well, okay, you still have to have Steam installed, but I’m less bothered about that now because it’s not as buggy. I still feel bad for the people who buy retail games and have to install Steam to play them (eg FEAR 2)
The high-polygon count models for GoldSrc Half-Life have been implemented. Yay.
Dodgy behaviour. Well, apparently you can play on servers which don’t enforce VAC if you choose so if you’re planning on cheating then it won’t ban your account as long as you stay away from the VAC servers. Since I don’t play multiplayer, this is kind of a moot point anyway…
They no longer use IE in the client
You can now sort of play a Steam game whilst another one is downloading, although it does pause it to free up bandwidth for the active game..
You can move the Steam directory, although you still can’t split it across multiple hard drives. Apparently junction points will work fine, but that’s getting a little messy. I don’t really have room to complain about 4Gb games now I’ve got FEAR 2 which is 13847Mb…
You CAN transfer cached files between users – they’ll just be verified online before you can use them
Even though you can tie your CD keys in to your account, if you were to lose your Steam account under mysterious circumstances, there’s nothing stopping you installing the original non-Steam version of the game with the same CD-key, is there?
The encryption is typically only for games until the release date, whereupon they get decrypted. And only Source games seem to do this anyway – nearly every other game I’ve come across just sticks the unencrypted files in the ‘common’ directory

So yeah. I no longer have a beef with Steam. Games for Windows Live however…

Erm.. I shall expect a reply in 2016 I guess.

Paul