A couple of years ago I bought some emerald earrings from a jeweler in NY that used Amazon. They had really good prices, but I was a little worried, so I used a Citibank virtual credit card number. When I received the earrings, they were pretty crappy, so I tried to return them. This process took over a month. When the jeweler tried to refund my money back onto the card, they couldn't, because the card had expired. (I had set it up to expire in a month) Citibank said there was nothing they could do, so the jeweler ended up mailing me a check. Lesson? Either get a number that lasts longer than a month so you can possibly return stuff, thereby exposing that CC number for longer than necessary, or make sure you don't buy anything with them you might want to return. :P

And I have no idea if things purchased with virtual credit card numbers are covered by extended warranties touted by the credit card companies....

The "customer" for the Nexus One was not just the cellular phone user, it was every HW manufacturer. For manufacturers it showed what Android could do. If you look at all the phones released prior to the Nexus One, the hardware specifications were very similar in terms of performance, which let's be honest, was not super awesome. Once the Nexus One came out, the specs for subsequent phones jumped to match it and surpass it, and adoption of Android phones exploded. It's not clear that jump would have happened if not for the Nexus One. With approximately 135000 sold by March, let's assume a total inventory of 150000 phones. At an estimated $175 manufacturing cost, that's $26.25 million. Given the massive explosion of phones and subsequent sales (and search revenue!) The cost of the Nexus One is nothing compared to Apple's advertising budget ($500 million in 2009). Even if you were generous and assumed Google spent $50M on the Nexus One as a whole, that's still only 10%. Sounds like Google made a smart move to me.

Um.

You're not forced to post in the Blizzard forums. You're not forced to add RealID friends. And face it, you're not forced to play World of Warcraft or Starcraft II. Every single thing you do in life has consequences. If you're not willing to accept the consequences of a particular action, DON'T DO IT. If you don't post on the Blizzard forums and don't add any friends via RealID you have not subverted "being smart about your online identity" at all.