Except that Valve never advertised it as NOT having DRM beyond Steam. Hell, most boxes don't mention DRM at all.
So there is no fraud, at all.
And, you know, from what I recall of the TOS/EULA/whatever, you are really just leasing access to their server for the game or some crap like that.
At best, you have an incredibly weak case that might (after MANY dollars) result in stricter rules regarding what boxes have to say. But a strong case? not at all.

The issue here is that the Credit Cards consider it fraud and they can be brought to bring evidence that it was fraud and why they think its fraud. Valve haven't a chance legally against Visa or MasterCard.
Yes I have seen their T&C's but they still need to have a VERY good reason for terminating your service. Because they don't like you is not good enough not in any court that I know of.
I still say its a stong case and you would win. If the end result is big stickers on boxes saying "TAGES Inside" then I think most of us here would like that. Also Steam would have to include a checkbox to let them know you accept installing the DRM.

You'd think it would be a fairly strong case, and it very well might be, the difficulty is in actually following it all the way through. In the US in particular we have the best justice system money can buy, so the question is always "So you want justice? Just how much justice can you afford?"
I'm in full agreement with you that companies should be nailed to the wall for the kind of fraud we're talking about. It's just that actually getting that to happen in reality is easier said than done.

Might as well bring down GamersGate.com too. Check out the Spore page:
http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-SPOREUS/spore
No DRM is listed. Looked too good to be true so I sent off an email to support and this was the response:
"Spore got DRM. I think it is SecuRom.
Best Regards
A****** ********
Customer Support Manager"
Hidden DRM, just like Steam. Buyer beware. Ask questions. Don't be so impulsive.

I can haz big checkbox saying "Hell NO! I don't want DRM on my machine : refund please!!"??

Well like I said fraud is criminal not civil. Yes if you have a gripe about someone then it comes out of your pocket but fraud implies that Valve have attempted to commit a crime. A crime is a crime no matter how big it is, even if its a $4 game. Isn't it people like Valve who tell us that downloading games is a crime?

"Do you accept SecuRom 7 that will knacker your DVD drive in 1/10 times?"
"No"
"K money refunded"
Sounds good to me.

But there are still new releases who by some strange unknown reason, use almost no-DRM schemes at all. Are they stupid??

Good point, such fraud should be considered criminal, but then it comes down to the matter of "what are you going to do about it?" At least with civil cases, as expensive as it may be to pursue, you can pursue the matter on your own. With criminal matters you need to contact the state's Attorney General (or whatever the equivalent is in Ireland), tell them what happened, then watch as they do absolute nothing about it. It sucks, it's wrong, but that's the way things currently work out. The most people can realistically do right now is simply try their hardest to avoid doing business in situations where if things go bad they have no reasonable recourse.

What exactly are we saying is fraud? Because if not talking about every single aspect of something on a box is fraud, I am going to sue the crap out of Rocksteady for not mentioning that there was two minutes of First-Person gameplay in Arkham Asylum :p
Or are you saying that Valve should be held accountable for refusing service when/if they ban your account? Honestly, I have yet to see a case of someone getting their actual account banned for anything short of extreme harassment on the forums/in-game, cheating (with something like fifty bots running...), or piracy.
And actually, it IS a good enough reason to just say "We don't like you". Retailers/sales people have rights too. If you go to the same store every day and act like a jerk, they have the right to request you stop going there.
As for the stuff you already own? Okay, let's pretend you play minigolf somewhere. And you bought some balls a while back. You get banned this week for taking a club to the windmill. They aren't going to reimburse you for the balls from last week. As for the balls this week? That is a grey area, but you essentially already used the "time" you bought when you bought the balls.
Again, there is just not a case here. The best you can hope for is a legal farce that just drags on in court and results in another bit of small print on a box.

No, they're beginning to wise up that they seriously miscalculated how intelligent some people are...:P
If I had a choice between cheap games with DRM or Slightly more expensive games without, I'd probably pay the no-DRM price...but then I found gog.com ^_^
WIN/WIN!!

If only Steam's support service is as responsive as Gamersgate's... :|

I don't know how the credit card companies considering it fraud rumor started, but looking at the Steam forums, I couldn't find one instance of someone actually contacting their credit card company and the CCC considering it fraud.
Just something you might want to consider before you assume the rumor is true. Of course, if someone can link the post in which someone claimed as such, I'll admit I was incorrect, but I couldn't find any such post.

There were several posts about it, but I don't know if I feel like finding them. In any event, you can almost always get a chrage back for an internet transaction if there was some kind of fraud involved.

Again, what "fraud"?
And I wouldn't really trust the Steam forums. These are the people who ask for refunds and complain about fascism every time a patch comes out for Team Fortress 2 :p

My main thing is I play a lot of old games. I love playing games from the 80s even today, and if they have DRM that restricts your installs, it prevents you from playing old games if the company never released a patch to remove the DRM.
With a retail copy you can almost always get around this with a cracked exe or something if you run out of installs, I did that myself with my retail copy of Mass Effect. With Steam though, this process becomes much, much harder to do.
I have never been a fanatical anti-DRM person, me buying from Steam to begin with proves that, but limited activations are not something I can tolerate easily.