If you are surprised you have not purchased many DVD drives or players.
There is not a single computer manufacturer (that I am aware of) that ship a region free DVD drive in their systems.
In order to manufacture a DVD drive, the manufacturer has to obtain a license from the DVD CCA, which mandates among other things that they must support region code. All DVD rom drives manufactured since Jan. 1, 2000 have been limited to a maximum of 5 changes of region.
The only way around this is to find a 3rd party that has hacked the particular drive you have and has put out a firmware update for it.
And while I don't care for this brand of DRM either, I personally do not have the money to travel around the world, thus am not collecting DVD's from all over the place and have never found this to be a real inconvenience.