IMO, the flaw in your argument is that you are assuming that all games give you this value.
There is a handful of games that people will value and the fact that you generally can not try before you buy is a serious issue.
For me, personally, I still play Rise of Nations on a PC. I have probably played at least 10 hours a week since it came out, nearly 10 years ago. Of course, that was worth the price. Then look at Star Wars, MMO, a game that got 2 hours of my time, TRYING to like it. And of course, there are others that are quickly deleted, not long after installation.
Before you go off and start talking about, "Review sites." Most of those are glorified paid for advertising by the makers.
IMO, the industry, whether it is for consoles or for pc's, needs to come out with fully playable demos, capped at some time or level OR implement very liberal return policies. Then, you will see a lot more people not complain as much about the price. The don't want to feel they got ripped off.

It's amazing how educated people got when there were not computers. I got into an argument with my daughter's private school over technology in the classroom. They were arguing over laptops (Mac/PC) and then over formats (Google Docs/Word.) I sat back and said if this is the whole goal of the school to 'bring in' technology, I will be withdrawing my child. They looked at me confused. I told them that if they are that determined about HOW they write the material versus WHAT the material they write is, then they are not educators, but lazy bums. I also argued with a parent who is a very smart guy, very wealthy and very successful. He argued that the education system is broke, that it is terrible, that technology needs to be pushed into the realm. I gave him a simple thought . . . If the education system is so broken, how did you do so well in it? Another parent who runs a nerd company doing PC repairs was arguing that the schools current machines were running XP on Shuttle boxes. He kept arguing how old the OS was. I told him, "If the school upgrades to Windows 7 or Mac OS X, do you think all the students will suddenly get straight A's?" People miss the perspective imo. Would I like to have gotten away from the paperwork nightmare that the school generated and sent to me? Sure. But I realized it made my child have to come talk to me. That act alone, opened up an opportunity for conversation. In essence, I could be a PARENT. When I wanted to find out how she was doing in a class, it was simple, I emailed the teacher directly. I used the old business trick and gave the teacher 48 hours to respond. If they didn't, I sent another notice and CC'd the principal and the board members. I got the answers I was looking for. There are lots of studies out there that have shown that there is no gain for electronic based teaching for the student. There is tremendous gain for electronic based teaching for the owners of the school. This is no different. There is a LOT to be said about the ability for a student to have interaction with a human teacher and human students.

In 1999 CD's sold for $15-20. You can thank Apple for the pricing shift. We have gone from paying that much for the physical media to 9.99-12.99. We have also gone to a "45's" model of selling singles. The 99 cent song has done more to bastardize the sale of the physical CD than anything. The music industry tried to replace the 45 in the past with cassette singles, but never had a true CD replacement.

The PDF is fine! Basically MS is saying that we will not release our source code to you for the underlying OS. They still want the APP to have the source code released. Apple would do the same with OSX if it was the underlying OS for the APP to run on. I am not sure how legal the current law is. It states that if a vendor creates an app that runs on any os, the app and the os have to have an audit review and the source code released. IANAL, but I think this would create an issue with the vendors submitting a voting machine that can not comply with the law.