Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Wow, this reminds me of someone trying putting a lock on a chain-link fence to keep out flood waters.

Pretty much. At least breaking in via the serial number route is usually detectable from either using a known bad key or detecting all the patches to the activation system. The OEM activation method however isn't quite as easy to detect unless they start messing around with a big table of known BIOS hashes or known hardware for each OEM config.