There was something in place to prevent scalpers from just making hundreds of accounts though. The registration opened on June 22nd for reference.

They also randomized the initial signup and did it over a few days to give themselves time to validate accounts. So if your account was only a few days old prior to April 27th and you bought a $1 game with zero play time you probably still got caught.

Here’s the link for those screenshots. They did more than most to try and limit bots/scalpers. Edit: This was also posted on June 22, so they’d have to have had insider knowledge or already had hundreds of accounts spun up.

If Valve wanted to be petty they know what Steam account the preorder for each serial number of Steam machine came from(they know family accounts as well, etc). They could stop you from logging into Steam on any account that isn’t that one for some duration of time. It’s not fool proof and likely depends on the OS reporting hardware information correctly but they could make it a big enough annoyance to deter people. Once the supply catches up and scalpers are less interested the whole system could just be dropped. It likely isn’t worth the effort to set it up and manage complaints though.