I think Steam competitor idea is interesting, but forcing it on your playerbase is generally quite a bad idea (see Origin or Uplay). I'd love to see more competition though.
Could you imagine if tomorrow, every Minecraft player needed to create a MS account and use some new sort of steam-like MS Games service to launch it? Sure, a few would quit, but not the majority. Overnight you could gain enough users to compete with Steam.
I'm not saying this will happen, or is even likely. Just that it makes sense to me.
A lot of people were super pissed. Gabe Newell said "I know, I know, but trust me: this is going to be AWESOME in the future" - boy was he right :)
You know what happened when you lost any of those physical assets before the rise of the Internet? Go buy a new game.
As someone who feels that it is a moral imperative to pay for creative works or forgo them, Steam is just fine by me.