Thing is, even with online play, there's no reason for a lot of these restrictions. Pausing? Why does it matter? The reason you can't do it in multiplayer is that you don't want to pause the game for everyone else. There's no reason in single player. You already mentioned how stupid logging in is. And I can't believe there's actually lag--there's no reason for that. Download pieces of the game. Oh noes, someone cheats a bit because the game is on their computer--so what? It's SINGLE PLAYER. I'm not cheating anyone but myself.
The only good thing I can see about this, BTW, is that maybe they'll realize that piracy is not driving down their sales. People who pirate aren't going to pay for this game anyways.