It should also be noted that the new SimCity isn't really a singleplayer game anymore. Sure you can play it by yourself, much like people could and did play CoH by themselves. But it's designed to be played multiplayer, with multiple people each with one or more cities in a shared region.
Personally I still think Steam has the best solution to the problem as far as the tradeoff between preventing piracy and annoying legitimate customers goes. You have to be online at least once to activate games, but it saves account data so if you don't have an internet connection when you start Steam it'll go into offline mode and let you play whatever the last account that was logged in has unlocked.
Of course, you see cracked versions of steam games without the steam requirement all the time. It's only marginally harder than cracking a conventional CD check. But really you can't go any further without it becoming an annoyance to large numbers of paying customers. At some point you have to value the people who are paying for your stuff more than trying to prevent people getting it without paying. Because really, if they couldn't pirate it most of them just wouldn't get it at all. It's not like erasing piracy is going to immediately make all these people go buy the game they'd otherwise pirate. Some might, but far from all.
Out of curiosity, anyone know what happens if you lose connection while playing this, or Origin stuff in general? Does it let you keep playing, or boot you out?