The competition is not the goal - the point isn't to see "who's better", the competition with real humans is just a tool to help improve the reasoning, planning and decision making capabilities in a less artificial environment than usually. The purpose of that project is to use Starcraft as a playground to test, review and improve reinforcement learning methods so that they can be used for other needs.

Any aspect of "fairness" is relevant if and only if it helps that goal. APM limits are important because we want the computer to choose strategies that would actually be good choices in that situation even for a human player, instead of being able to win with strategies that are powerful only because of superhuman clicking speed. On the other hand, requiring the computer to press buttons with a robot hand doesn't really facilitate improvements to the decisionmaking part, so it's irrelevant even if it would make it more fair.