asking me to provide something twice (I'll just copypaste from the first field, thanks; would be more useful if you just printed a confirmation of what I wrote onto the next page).
Asking for something (normally a password or email) twice is for your benefit -- to guard against typos. There are many typos you might miss visual confirmation of, I'm fairly certain the type-twice method is a sound one.
Asking passwords twice is quite ok--even Unix does it; it's the other things sometimes asked twice which is totally useless. Most commonly it's something like having to retype your email address. Woot?! You can already see it in plaintext so you can just correct any errors there.
Argh, no! How many people would actually bother to visually verify their address? A typo here is actually more problematic than in your password -- if you typo that, you'll be instantly aware of it and can do an e-mail reset.
If there's a typo in the e-mail field, you won't be aware of it until you forget your password and try to do a reset -- and for the majority of services, that means you are now completely locked out of your account.
Asking for something (normally a password or email) twice is for your benefit -- to guard against typos. There are many typos you might miss visual confirmation of, I'm fairly certain the type-twice method is a sound one.