Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.