I would guess that most of these are going to be purchased simply to prevent someone else from getting them
I would agree with this part.
and that most of them will never actually be placed into production.
But not with this part.
Well, I said "most", some will likely be placed into use, but I am willing to wager that most of them will not be actively promoted. So mcdonalds. might be set up to point to the same thing as mcdonalds.com but I doubt http://McDonalds will actually be promoted because of the potential breakage. Image what happens in a shop that has a farm of servers named with a fast food theme and they have a mcdonalds.example.com, arbys.example.com, burgerking.example.com, etc. So a user in that domain trying to get to http://mcdonalds ends up going to mcdonalds.example.com A company deploying this would end up with a flood of complaints and the more "famous" the company is, the more likely they are to have problems.