Honestly the worst thing about it is that you have to manually check to see if your battery is affected. A proactive email might be better than telling people to enter their serial on a site to check.
Privacy is the right to be left alone, and dying in a fire seems like the exact opposite of being left alone.
You can't use iMessage without a valid Mac SN, for example.
Can you imagine how this would be abused by computer marketing departments? It's bad enough when they have your e-mail address.