Max Payne is a different case, no point in comparing it. Diablo's release brought an absolute flood of people buying the game because Diablo 2 defined their childhoods, and even Blizzard's almighty servers couldn't take the strain for the first 5 days after it came out. Releasing Payne concurrently when they were holding the servers together with spit n glue, that would have brought the entire show down.
I seriously doubt this decision is to encourage double dipping, the number of double dippers would be so small that it wouldn't move the needle financially. It's either about optimisation, or else getting the sale out of people whose choices are split between pirating the PC version of the game on release, or buying the console version.