This is hardly new. I remember some older games who used a "limited install" option (I think Spore was one of the more prominent, also Earth 2160), and they generally bound themselves to a "digital hash" of whatever internal IDs your hardware has to "prevent piracy". As far as I remember there was a lot of people who simply used cracks for these games after buying them.
Install limits are silly. Stuff like that only ends up encouraging people to crack the exe, or pirate the game even seeing as if you're pirating you actually get less hassle than if you buy the game. But then again Ubisoft has the "MPAA syndrome", aka it's stuck in the past and has no idea how to make use of the internet to boost their sales instead of wasting money on DRM systems that don't protect jack squat anyway.
