What´s the point of the new copy protection?

[Archonsod]

mivayan said:
Most mainstream games have intentional bugs if the program thinks you're a pirate? I find that hard to believe.

They're not intentional bugs. Many developers treat it as a kind of Easter Egg. To take Vietcong for example, if the protection triggered it reduced the hitboxes to a single pixel, gradually enlarged characters heads over time and other strangeness like low gravity grenades. I've actually seen cases where tech support has been asked how the protection can be triggered because players want to see the game in that mode.
I guess it depends on the developer - plenty probably see it as an 'officially sanctioned' method of goofing about with the code.

Couldn't at least a few legitimate users have their cd key be identical to a widespread one created by a key-generator?

The small number of false positives I was talking about. Most keygens wouldn't come up with an actual key though (they're designed to trick the checking method rather than duplicate the keys themselves).
The problem there though is telling them the key entered is fake - they have the manual in front of them, your likely to confuse the matter. In that case, you'd need the user to get in touch so you could identify the problem - instead most would likely attempt to return or exchange the game thinking the key was broken.

Yeah, support can probably solve such cases. But I dont want everyone to email support everytime a patch introduces an odd bug.

Happens whether there's a bug or not : You can see the difference on these forums though - if it's an actual bug, everyone can replicate it and people tend to wait for official word from the developer (it becomes a case of the bug becoming "known"). In the case of the copy protection, you find only a couple of people with the problem and others stating that it's working fine for them, which would hopefully encourage those with the problem to contact support.
At the end of the day, I suppose the logic is that pirates aren't going to pay for the game, so why bother marketing to them? Rather than using the protection as a method to enforce a shareware licence (ie encourage people to buy the full game) it's used simply to prevent illegitimate users from playing the game. Yes, it might lead them to think the game is unplayably buggy, but since you're not counting them as part of your potential market in the first place, you don't really care.