You have to take this info with a grain of salt. Blizzard is not allowing pure LAN play in SC2. So if you want to play multiplayer, you're playing through battle.net with a valid key. And the game's largest draw is for multiplayer. So it is nice that they aren't using copy protection, but it's not like the entire game is wide open to pirates anyways.
Edit: And yes, I've already pre-ordered the CE
