No, they do not have a point. I bought Settlers 7, shortly after release, for full price. I couldn't play it. My internet connection at the time would "blip" every ten minutes or so, it would go down for a couple of seconds and come back up. Every time this happened I got kicked out of my game.
The next Ubisoft game that came out, I pirated. Why? Because the pirated version of Settlers 7 /works/. If I'm paying something, I expect a better experience than I would get if I didn't pay. To me, that seems like a fairly basic tenet of economics.
Many game companies "get it". Valve for example provide me with unending streams of new content for games I have paid for, even going as far as giving me a free copy of Portal 2. Thanks Valve! You win money.
Companies like Epic have basically gone out on the record and said "we stopped supporting PC because of piracy." If you were a publisher, what would you do? There are precious few successes of games without DRM, and remember that all Steam games are also DRM'd.
I /think/ there are 360 titles that do this, at least to some content.
It's not something that the console makers do themselves.
[edit, spelling]
Games like those published by Ubisoft do this on PC, and when it goes down, they say "well, if only you guys didn't pirate our games all the time, we wouldn't have to abuse you this way." And, to be honest, they have a point, because PC game piracy is out of control.
No-one thinks online authorization is great. It pisses off legitimate customers and it's another service you have to run. It's not like the publishers are really getting anything tangible out of it bar the hope that their games won't be pirated to all hell (they will be).
I would like it if games/consoles had a kill switch on them, so that after x years they no longer require an authorization in case the service goes away, but I highly doubt that will happen.