Personally, I wasn't overtly aware that they weren't a distributor (but granted, I haven't been actively looking for a distributor to buy from anyway). They've presented various NIB WoZ games on their youtube channel, so that's likely where the confusion could be coming from.

On the other hand, TNT says they include a service plan of some sort with the games they sell.

http://www.tntamusements.com/services/

That reminds me of this whole situation almost sounding like it's a hair away from the WPC days and distributor territories.

The reason for the serial numbers seems strange by today's standards. In 1992, Williams' agreement with its distributors gave them exclusive sales right to a territory. They did not have the right to sell outside of their territory. But some were doing just that. In order to track the game's origin from a distributor into the wild, the blacklight number was added. Williams knew where the game was originally shipped. If the game turned up outside of that territory, it was assumed that the distributor had "Bootlegged" the game outside of his territory. Then it was up to management to decide what penalty to incur on the offender. Remember, this was during a time when it was PROFITABLE to sell and operate pinball machines. This practice would be laughable today because ANY sale of a pinball machine is a good sale.

http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2684