I firmly agree that it's foolish and stupid to limit a game's functionality by making it phone home all the time (when it doesn't need to). You laid down a bunch of good reasons, so I won't bother with my own. Suffice to say that internet connections aren't always available, and leave it at that.

When it comes to ownership though. . .*shrug*. People have been paying for subscription entertainment services for years, and "buying" company controlled games is just another form of that. People who are upset about this mainly complain about semantics, in my experience. Do you own the game? Not completely, I suppose. Does that matter? Not to me it doesn't. Worst case scenario, the company goes belly-up, and shuts down their servers in a year or so, without providing any alternate means of playing the game. Even then, I've had the game for a year. I've probably played it as much as I'd ever want to. I've surely gotten more value out of the purchase price than my $60/mo cable bill, which lets me watch Seinfeld re-runs whenever I want.

Anyway, I'm not trying to say that I wouldn't rather own my game, because there are, for sure, a few minor benefits to that. However, "subscription gaming" is not the disaster you're trying to make it out to be, and is still a far better deal than a lot of rampantly popular services that no one thinks twice about paying for. The demise of ownership will not kill PC gaming.