I consider not having access to XBL a big deal. Even if you are a silver member and do not care about playing online at all, you get access to DLC (some of which is actually free and awesome), XBLA games (all of which have free demos), free demos for a lot of retail games (since you are legit, this is a nice bonus for you. The pirates can always pirate games if they want a demo). You also get game patches (lots of games ship out buggy this gen so this is very important). You also lose HDD install functionality when you get banned btw (HDD installs means less laser wear, less chance of disc wear, less heat generated by console, less noise).
For pirates to sacrifice XBL just so that they can play games for free, it's totally not worth it. They are settling for an upscaled last gen experience (in fact worse than last gen in some ways as games ship out buggy these days whereas last gen devs weren't as lazy because there were no patches to fix mistakes) as opposed to a current gen experience.
Piracy is pretty tempting but you know what? I can't imagine going back to piracy because it's difficult enough for me to keep up with backlogs with legally-purchased games as is. Back when I used to pirate a lot, I had tons of burned CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that would just lie around unused. Video games are actually very cheap forms of entertainment. I have like 14 360 games (15 soon) and I'll be buying more definitely and yet I haven't come anywhere close from getting my fill of the games I currently own.
