Well, Steam isn't THAT bad. It's a little annoying at times, because you can't get into a game, but they're working on getting the kinks out of it. Once you get Steam installed and working correctly, it works quite well. It's faster in my experience and it should Valve quite a bit in trying to prevent cheating.
The one thing I don't like is the fact that they want to upload Half-Life 2, CS2, and other games to paying customers via Steam. They can't possibly pull it off decently because the amount of bandwidth required to transfer such large amounts of data to so many people at once is incredible. I'm planning on buying and installing HL2 by just purchasing it at a store, instead of getting that Steam subscription thing where you have to pay a monthly fee, but you get all new games such as CS2 and TF2 for free . . . though . . . now that I think of it, getting those for free instead of having to buy them does sound kinda tempting . . . but I'd have to download them via Steam, which would take hours due to all their bandwidth being sucked up by all the other thousands of customers attempting to download the same games at the same exact time.