It will have its chance, at the moment its hard to force customers to purchase a product just to compete.

I believe hardware anti-cheats will be more efficient but until we have companies (cevo, esl, mlg etc) that are willing to front the cost of the devices for the customers, it'll be a short lived thing.

I'd imagine, some form of a rental system would work market fit wise, sort of like a DVR from your cable company.

Until then, software seems to be the easiest solution sadly.