Oh dear! Apparently my name did not comply with the Google Doubleplus Good Naming Policy (apparently the 'brainchild' of +Vic Gundotra) and so now I've had to switch to using a name that a different group of people know me as. I do prefer to use my "Nom de Internet" on sites such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Karora and http://identi.ca/karora but I've also never made any secret of the name which my government calls me by, either.
However the need for "Real Names" to encourage civilised debate is simply baseless. People who troll in the comments on G+ will just have their comments removed by the person who posts, and people who troll in their posts will just be removed from other's streams.
Even if that weren't the case, Google will have enough data with user's clicking on the '+1' and 'share' so that in a very short order those things would probably not be necessary.
Anonymity is pretty normal in the real world, too: when I am approached for directions by a tourist they don't ask for my ID, we have an anonymous conversation while I tell them where to go. When I buy a cup of coffee, I hand over some anonymous coins and I get an anonymous cup of coffee in return. When I ship a parcel to my mother I write some stuff on the back which is a return address, but I've shipped parcels with other people as the return address in the past. No problem.
Apparently Facebook also has this kind of "Real Names" policy, but with half a dozen pseudonymous accounts on there I can say for sure that I've never seen it, so I can only assume you have to be pretty obvious and obnoxious for it to kick in, which is a much more sensible approach really: it's fine so long as nobody complains.
It seems clear that a "Real Names" policy is pointless and unnecessary, and there are many and varied reasons why anonymity and pseudonymity are valuable and worthwhile as you have so ably expressed above, so why is Google harassing their users in this manner?
I really do hope G+ grows out of this abusive and childish policy soon, so I can delete my facebook account - as I had expected to do by now before I encountered this idiocy.
My hope is that G+ are only continuing with it because it's getting them such great press, but that eventually they'll get over it.
I sure hope so: I am liking the somewhere-between-facebook-and-twitter feel, but I'm sure I can get over it and go somewhere else