Google Now Limiting Email Account Creation

Is this a problem for marketers with many web sites who create numerous accounts for marketing?

Copied from a post on a message board:

I just went to sign up for a new gmail account to use for RSS submission and social bookmarking.
To my surprise I now have to supply a mobile phone number, and can’t activate the account without an SMS code sent to that phone.

I don’t have a mobile phone, can I sign up?

If you’d like to sign up for a Gmail address, you need to have a mobile phone that has text-messaging capabilities.
If you don’t have a phone, you may want to ask a friend if you can use his or her number to receive a code. Also, if you know someone who already has a Gmail address, you can ask them to email an invitation to you.

And Google’s reported take on the issue:

One of the reasons we’re offering this new way to sign up for Gmail is
to help protect our users and combat abuse. Spam and abuse protection
are two things we take very seriously, and our users have been very
happy with the small amount of spam they’ve received in Gmail. We take
many measures to ensure that spammers have a difficult time sending
their spam messages, getting these messages delivered, or even
obtaining a Gmail address (spammers will often use many different
addresses to send spam). Sending invitation codes to mobile phones is
one way to address this, as the number of addresses created per phone
number can be limited.

If you’re planning to set up lots of sites for your promotion efforts, you would end up registering the same mobile number a lot.

This initially seems to create a major obstacle as  Google may notice once you’ve registered a certain number of gmail accounts and step in somehow? Or even cancel your free account? Many people always felt the anonymity of gmail was its biggest advantage, now that’s beginning  to “disappear”.