The Steam-based nature of Naval Action was a major factor in me deciding to pre-order this game. I tend to distrust games I cannot have on Steam. They have none of the convenient features of steam, and you can get burned by scummy devs/publishers a lot worse than on Steam where such trickery on the end of devs/publishers will be pasted in uncensorable glory on their store page.
I see there's a lot of confusion as to what 'Steam DRM' actually is. Steam DRM is DRM done right. Once you purchase a game, it's yours forever. You can always download it and install it as long as you keep your steam account. Purchasing a game on disk is just purchasing a license to play the game. I remember the dark days of limited-use CD keys. Being able to install any game any number of times on any machine is wonderful; there's no extra hoops to jump through.
The community features are completely unobstrusive and can be disabled at your leisure. I've never had reason to disable said features as they're so dang useful for everything from instant messaging to internet browsing while in-game. The Steam overlay is GabeN's gift to mankind: instant internet browsing all without actually leaving the game. And that's only the bare surface. Losing connection to Steam servers is nowhere near the atrocities inflicted upon you by companies like Ubisoft. Single player is still single player (unless of course that pesky third-party DRM raises its ugly head).
As long as you have an internet connection, stuttery or not, you will be able to connect to Steam the vast majority of the time. Exceptions, as always, are made for when servers are down for maintenance.
And speaking of said servers: Remember when Lizard Squad took down and crippled Xbox Live and PSN, the two largest used games networks, for days at a time? They tried to do the same to Steam. Sure they managed to 'take down' Steam. Only one server. For 16 minutes. Meanwhile the other 60+ servers were running just fine while this minor inconvenience took place.
I will always choose Steam releases over any alternative, and I'm ecstatic the devs can and are using Steam to facilitate the game's development.