I wont. In fact, I would welcome a good soaking.

Short answer: MW2.
Longer Answer: with the amount of boycott-criers who still bought MW2 on release or shortly after, the gaming community has lost every inch of credibility and clearly pointed out, that they're mindless, loudmouthing sheeps.
So I wouldn't count on that one, even less then the publishers seem to do.

And it's now a complete no-show in the UK store's list.

Some games have even been cracked before the official release. I think Spore and a few others were.

Generally, games are only cracked pre-release when they essentially use the exact same model as another recently cracked game. I think MEPC came first, and Spore used its DRM. And after the Release Groups "failed" on MEPC, they wanted to get an easy win.
I suspect that AC2 is going to be a lot like MEPC was. A lot of people are going to buy it because it won't be properly cracked in the first few days (maybe even first week). And with a model this pervasive, the chance of having a weird "bug" (sort of like the "Jerusalem bug" for AC1) is very high. I wouldn't be surprised if AC2 is never fully 100% playable for pirates. Simply because, by the time they figure it out, there won't be any "prestige" to cracking a few week old game.
That being said, there is no chance that this will last beyond the first one or two games. After the groups figure out how to bypass it, it will be easy to bypass it for Splinter Cell and Silent Hunter 5.
So AC2 may prove a bit difficult to pirate, but I don't see the dirty rotten scoundrels having difficulty after this.

One thing is for certain. If you piss off a large enough group of gamers, they WILL go out of their way to spite you.
EA learned that the hard way with Spore.

It won't be the case here, simply because there will be a communication with the server, and there won't be any active servers before release. The reason why I think it will take longer then a few hours is because it is a new solution and it will require some research on hackers' part.
Spore had Securom online activation - something that has been done before (Bioshock). And while many games have day one crack, there are exceptions like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (which coincidently happens to be a Ubisoft game) - 422 days before hackers got rid of Starforce.

Depends on whose perspective you're looking at it from. It seems the game is being released in the EU a full week and a half before being released in the US. I'm betting that from the perspective of folks in the US the game will be cracked even before it's released.

It's listed as number 3 for Japan. For one simple reason; all the games that could knock it off the list aren't available here.