Warning: above link seems to contain a trojan that spreads through the domain's "favicon.ico".

The statement that your simple example would take a bash expert hours or days to implement is false.
I'd consider myself to have little more than basic bash scripting experience, and what you describe would take at most 5 minutes.

An example of a very successful dongle scheme is the one used by Steinberg for their product "Cubase". I think they employ some variant of the encryption based scheme.
It's one of the most popular music production suites, and they've utilized effective dongle based protection since version 3.

Version 3 was hard to crack, and it took some time before a stable crack was released.
But it did backfire a little bit - the dongle emulator was faster than the actual dongle, so the cracked version performed better.

But version 4 was never reliably cracked - cracks were released, but caused random crashes.
Then version 5 came out - I see cracks for it now, but don't know if they work - the ones I saw (even almost half a year after release of the software), made the application unstable and unusable.
Recently version 6 came out and I see no cracks available.
 

We have this in Denmark now. I can login using "NemID" (a two-factor single sign-on authentication system, which gives access to just about every interaction you'd ever need with the state).
Using this, I can see my entire medical record. It was actually quite fun to look at when first introduced - records of doctor and hospital visits from before I can even remember (from when I was about 2 years old - I'm 29 now), another visit at age 7, which I distantly remember. And of course the doctor's comments on earlier emergency room visits from my youth, that I'd happily forgotten about now. :)

Well, a quick search tells that the AppleADay trademark has been registered in the following classes (translated from French by Google translate):
---
Nice Class Number: 35
List of Goods and Services: Advertising, business management, business organization and business management, consulting for business management, business administration, publication of publicity texts; distribution [distribution] of samples, product demonstrations, promoting sales, advertising mail, updating of advertising material; clerical, service retail ready meals, take away or not administrative management of restaurants, snack bars and delivery services for food.
Nice Class Number: 39
List of Goods and Services: Transportation package delivery, and packaging of products, delivery of goods, delivery of goods ordered by mail, delivery of meals and food products, including controlled correspondence, including telephone or Mail Order by communication via computer terminals or via the Internet.
Nice Class Number: 43
List of Goods and Services: Food Services (food), temporary accommodation, hotel services, pensions, services, bars, services Brewery, coffee shops, restaurants [meals], catering services, cafeterias, rental of chairs, tables, table linen and glassware; rental of meeting rooms and dining rooms, free catering service.
---

From this it doesn't seem Apple has any reason for complaint.

I run gentoo too, it's been very stable for this server:

$ uptime
14:22:32 up 440 days, 20:47, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

$ uname -a
Linux pdp-innovation 2.6.10-hardened-r3 #4 SMP Thu Feb 24 15:36:46 CET 2005 x86_64 GNU/Linux