dream on guys
there WILL be steam. In every package, on every installation. Why?
Because steam is integrated... big time.
And a second good reason: So they can splash up 'new mods for HL 2' every time yo ustart that damn program to earn more money... yay.
STEAM is the ultimate 'marketing strategy' for Valve. They don't need a distributor. They just send you the bytes and you send the dollars/euro's. Simple, and more profit for Valve. (ie, same data but more money ratio).
Besides, in STEAM there are dll's which are used in every HL/HL2 game now. You should try to run a game from Steam without it. Ie, remove STEAM core or whatever and try to run HL.exe and such, ie, the counter-strike directory in the steamapps; this EXE file is not like the 'normal' hl.exe file you would run to have it standalone.
Either way; STEAM will be in, period