very interesting reading on here...
I found an article in the past regarding the achievements question was not easy to find, but it was something you needed to code into the EXE, I believe it was simply a call to the Steam file which would sit in the same folder...
hope that helps answer that question...
Also yeah aside from steam security frankly i keep hearing people saying they cracked it already but never see articles backing this up... but I suppose it is the nature of Computing that anything is crackable its just 1 and 0 anyway...