That panel should have had a joke somewhere about how god damn many crates you DO get. They fill up your inventory so damn fast.

Steam shifts the balance of the perception of quality between Steam games and totally indie games to Steam's advantage. It has nothing to do with the actual quality of the game. If the first proposition is true, then Steam games will be more likely to be bought than indie games, thus making putting a game on Steam to be a great incentive.
However, truly indie games lose face.

I was going to write more but I refrained. The truly indie games will stay indie and those that just want to cash in will have Steam.

With regards to whatever you're talking about concerning competition: what you're talking about is popularity. It's a competition to make the most popular game, not a good, challenging, difficult, satisfying game. A game doesn't have to have these qualities to be popular (ex. Angry Birds, new Call of Duty games, and Madden was previously mentioned). Steam sets up a way to determine the latest fad and an incentive to make unoriginal, conceptually safe, "tried-and-true" games to quickly cash in, while belittling the chances of a sleeper hit to reach popular status (popular games float to the top and stay there, people try to clone these games, but regardless of whether or not the clones succeed, the chances of a new game to suddenly become popular decreases - same thing as the UMS system for SC2).

Pirating is a method of acquiring the game. If a game can be pirated, practically everyone is capable of acquiring AKA accessing the game. Thus, pirating increases the accessibility of a game.
If the developer's intention is widespread popularity, makig a game easily pirated is probably the fastest way of achieving rhe goal short of giving away the game for free.
A popular game is likely to have more sales than an unpopular game. Even if a bunch of people pirate a game, if the game ends up becoming extremely popular, people who don't know how to pirate something or would like to legitimately buy the game to support the developer will end up purchasing it (these two groups are larger than the group of pirates, which one can probably assume either does not have the income to purchase the game or would not have ever played the game unless he could pirate it).

How is the assumption that Steam makes game more difficult to pirate false? The only cases I can think of is if the game is not distributed solely through Steam.

Even my physical copy of Skyrim had to be verified on Steam servers so that I could play it.

Valve has a good head on their shoulders but the only game of theirs I found even remotely enjoyable was Counterstrike. As for steam, some modding communities for some reason are very much against it (Skyrim, SoaSE) because they are woefully uneducated and superstitious.