"Hi, I bought the VHS tape for this movie, but I don't actually have a VHS player. Can I get a digital download instead?"
If you purchased a box with a DVD in it, shouldn't you ... have a DVD drive?
Of course, it's in Adobe's interests to give you the digital download anyway, since you're a loyal customer ... but should you have an expectation that they provide you with the software in a format other than the format it came in when you bought it?
But this is all entirely besides the point made in the article: that outsourced customer service is terribad when they don't actually have the resources/training/motivation to fix problems.
I suspect that for a lot of companies, "Live Chat" isn't as much about helping customers as it is avoiding the costs associated with a phone-based call center. Chat agents can chat with multiple customers at once, because chat users are more tolerant of delays that would drive call in customers to hang up.
You buy the license.
The license isn't bound to a delivery format, and in 2013 downloads are the common delivery formats for anything other than console games. If any party is being deliberately obtuse, it's Adobe.
If you've bought Creative Suite and they've since released a new version, they won't do a cross-grade, so there's a thousand-dollar plus penalty for switching from Mac to Windows (or vice versa, though you could run Windows in a VM).