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I wouldn't call it dumb, just... short-sighted, and perhaps disrespectful to the customer. I'm not familiar with Mass Effect, although I'd read that it was going to have this, too. In the case of Spore, it sounds like a lot of the game will rely on an internet connection. That is, the other creatures and races that you go up against will be races created by other "real" people. Your own race will also be uploaded to the Spore servers, and other people will get to face off against it in their own games. Very neat idea, unless you get skeptical and wonder if the developers became lazy about creativity and figured they'd let the users do that work for them.
I don't think it's a requirement that Spore players be online, but they'll certainly want to be online. Combine that with the fact that most of us are online or have an active internet connection a good majority of the time, and it seems to make sense. It's one of the more aggressive anti-piracy measures, and there should be barely any collateral damage.
The fear that I heard raised was this: what happens if I don't play the game for 10 days, then my internet goes out, and I want to play? That's a very realistic scenario. Will the game note that it's been 10+ days since it last authenticated and not let you play?
At this point I've been on both ends of the consumer spectrum - pirate and legit buyer. As a pirate, this sort of stuff doesn't bother you in the slightest. If the game works for 10 days and then stops, you got 10 days' worth of fun (which is already a fairly long period of time if you game obsessively). If the game barely works, then that's to be expected. If the game doesn't work, then oh well - there's always something else to do, perhaps another game to play. But if I'm going to pay $40-60, I want to be able to play whenever and wherever I feel like it, and I expect everything to be nearly perfect (I'm merciful about that - we should all expect perfection, really). "Whenever and wherever" includes five or ten years from now, when most people will probably have forgotten about the game and EA will be looking at that authentication server as a wasteful expense to keep running.
Maybe we could compromise. Keep this sort of nonsense into the game, but have the developers agree to release a patch to remove it in six months, maybe even a year. I'm sure it'll be cracked before then anyway, but that way they can feel like piracy isn't eating into their sales, and after they're happy with the initial sales surge we can all feel good about our purchase.
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