There is a grey area where you can have a Genuine copy of Windows that you paid for (and that can still Windows update) but was derived from an OEM license that was transferred to another machine.
This is still desirable compared to torrenting because a pirated copy will end up failing the Genuine check, will no longer get updates, and will happily be a part of some botnet some day.
That said my current machine is Win7 enterprise that I somehow, if only through brute force rather than actual know-how, managed to convince that its install had been validated.
This is still desirable compared to torrenting because a pirated copy will end up failing the Genuine check, will no longer get updates, and will happily be a part of some botnet some day.