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StarCraft II Delayed Until 2010
Blizzard has just announced that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty won't be released this year. From their announcement: "Over the past couple of weeks, it has become clear that it will take longer than expected to prepare the new Battle.net for the launch of the game. The upgraded Battle.net is an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward. This extra development time will be critical to help us realize our vision for the service. ... As we work to make Battle.net the premier online gaming destination, we'll also continue to polish and refine StarCraft II, and we look forward to delivering a real-time strategy gaming experience worthy of the series' legacy in the first half of 2010."
Well if that's the case then you are certainly correct that LAN would be pretty much dead as indeed all packets would head to the gateway and back.
But I think you'd be wrong about not providing the infrastructure for "improved client experience" - there's a huge gain in the experience for a whole lot of "internet only" players by having a client server model. Pretty much you can eliminate a large range of cheats, make game updates without pushing client patches, solve NAT traversal issues almost entirely, and ensure players can't do silly thing like yank a cable or edit a NAT table when they're losing.
That said, there's a huge cost infrastructure here with servers and bandwidth, not to mention you need to host all over the world to reduce latency. Your points around subscriptions and piracy hold true, and unless they allow 3rd party servers or do-it-yourself servers the LAN party would be dead. But given the pluses/minuses and the lack of specific details on the matter I'd tend to give them the benefit of doubt before calling them a "sell out".