The sea of numbers doesn't tell us much. I'd really love to hear more than anecdotal information about people who download games from torrents and then purchase them later if they deem them worthwhile; I don't doubt the stories of those who claim to be such, but I suspect they're the minority. (But I would like to hear a more statistical analysis, as difficult as I recognize usable numbers on such a thing would be to obtain.)
My understanding is that significant part of what inspired CD Projekt to creat Good Old Games (GOG) was that in their native Poland piracy was so rampant that one was far more likely to run across a pirated version of a game, one way or another, than a legitimate one, and that incomes in Poland were generally quite low and so piracy was the only way a lot of people were ever going to get to play the games at all.
This somewhat leads to the question: recognizing that piracy numbers are high, how many of those pirated copies are in the hands of people who simply don't have either the ability or the funds to obtain a legitimate copy of the game in question? The "100 to 1" inability to pirate-to-legitimate sale hints at this somewhat, but it doesn't color in the lines. The street hawker in a bazaar in Baghdad and the rich teenager pulling games off a torrent in Los Angeles may both be pirates, but throwing them into the same statistical group only muddies the issue.
I'd also love to see an article about all the other reasons PC gaming is taking a beating compared to console gaming. Yes, piracy is an issue, but it's also become a whipping boy. The relative ease of creating something on the platform ought, one would think, to mean a wide variety of games; instead, people pay up for expensive developer's kits in order to design for widely available, standardized hardware that's well understood on the consumer level. PC versions of games are often the best versions, and usually have the potential to be even when they're not. But we often seem to be stuck in an endless cycle where PC gamers complain about botched versions of the games they love, or features they're used to being left on the cutting room floor, or rushed ports that bring every weakness of the console they were made for and add some bugs as well... And the developers sigh, look how much work they put into those ports, note the poor sales compared to every other version they've released, and quietly wonder if they'll bother next time. The big players like Microsoft haven't done the industry or the consumer a lot of favors: Games for Windows looks increasingly like a conspiracy to widen the acceptance of the 360 controller as a standard more than anything else, and the PC version of Live mostly stands out as one more alternative in a sea of noncompatable multiplayer matchmaking services. And God help you if your development cycle overlaps the release of a new OS or a new version of Direct X.
Part of my love of the PC stems from my understanding of its guts: I know a fair amount about computers, I grew up with them, and I usually feel that what I don't understand is available to me if I'm willing to put in the time and effort. With consoles, there's a sense of the developers as gods on high deigning to provide the fruit of their wizardry to the peons who could never do as much. While that sense is diminishing, it seems likely that the closed and proprietary nature of consoles will always put a buffer between developers and consumers. The significantly lower barrier between the two on the PC probably plays a part in piracy, but it also creates an unusual sense of community, I think, especially in slightly older gamers such as myself. I might not be a Monet or a Da Vinci, but I can see how they used a brush and I can at least buy paints and try to imitate their work, to gain an understanding of the underlying technique and to make reasonable and intelligent criticisms of their work that's more like sitting at the same table than calling up to the mountain, if that makes sense.
