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The first thing I would want to make sure everyone understands is that this is not a GM design flaw. It is just the nature of internal combustion engines. All modern engines, regardless of manufacturer, suffer from blow by and some amount of carbon build up and have upper induction cleanings in their recommended services. Direct injection engines are just especially vulnerable, regardless of the manufacturer, because they do not have fuel flowing over the intake valves. The European manufacturers where the first to really start seeing issues because they were right up front on adopting direct injection technology. Now just about every new engine that comes out is direct injection including the new LT based V8s from GM because the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
At 8k miles you have nothing to worry about. If you were to go completely unprotected and did not do the recommended upper induction cleanings by 80k miles you could see serious issues. I know of 2 Camaro5 members that had to have top end rebuilds around that range due to carbon build up. Both are running our catch can now.
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If the catch can is that important it should have been standard equipment on the cars. My owners manual does not mention upper induction cleaning as regular maintenance. In fact I don't think they mention it at all. You are right cars have been blowing by since the invention of the internal combustion engine. Many of those engines went 200k plus miles with no upper induction cleaning because they were not DI. As I tried to state I am not debating the benefit of clean intakes and valves. I'm only questioning GM and other manufacturers decision to go with this design with out a standard catch can and maintenance schedule to accompany it. Seems reasonable if it is that important. If these horror stories are true there are going to be a lot of 2nd and 3rd owners of these cars in the future who will have problems that could/should have been avoided. Of course this is all just my opinion. And I'm sorry, if a buyer is expected to run out and buy an aftermarket modification to keep his new car running within specs, I call that a design problem or flaw.