That "hat" bought outside of Steam, cannot be used by a player in Steam.
but if ubisoft were allowed to set prices like that it would almost certainly count as anticompetitive practices, right?
Are you really saying that Valve should be allowed to set the prices of Ubisoft products, but Ubisoft shouldn't be allowed to price their own products? What?
Why stop there, then? Why wouldn't Steam go after, say, Playstation? Someone gets an exclusive DLC for Playstation that some players can "see" during games, what do we do in that case?