I've heard this rationalization before, but I doubt it's a widespread practice in the pirates' world. Look, people are selling their soul to get "free products" (think about all the use cases where you are the product when using all the nice "free services"). Free is awesome. We're used to free. We demand free. We get offended when some app asks for $1.99 (I exaggerate for style of course, but as someone who has an app on the Mac AppStore, this comment has a reason rooted in reality - and for the record my app is Free while you try it and you pay to unlock it so you can customize it).

It's an interesting rationalization for an illegal activity, but you are not forced to go down the path of illegality by pirating a software you want to try. You can ask the author for a trial version, and if that leads nowhere, you can just skip this software. Not happy with the terms of the deal? Don't take the deal! The author would be wise to have a trial option, but doesn't owe it to anyone.

Personal anecdote time: when I was much younger I wanted to buy an exotic car and the dealer didn't offer test drives (understandably). I'm not sure it would feel acceptable to anyone if I had snuck into the dealership at night and took the car out for a spin around the block and put it back after an hour just to "test it out". I realize many flaws can be pointed out in my analogy easily, but the point is that one can get away with "illegal software test drive" because it's software and one would never think of doing it with hardware, because the risks of getting caught (and their consequences) are too high when we deal with tangible assets vs sitting home downloading cracks or serialz.