On my 3rd year of raising strawberries, I'm pro-pinching.
What I've found is that a plant that doesn't have well established roots, if you don't pinch, you also get
smaller strawberries. When I'm canning, I get really tired of coring tiny berries. But if you're just going to toss a few on your cereal, you probably won't care about that as much.
Also crucially important to note is which kind of strawberry you are working with...
On Everbearers, these are mother plants you will be keeping for 4-5 years. Each year, the plant gets stronger and develops more crowns which equals more berries per plant. I only pinch blooms and runners in the first SPRING on my newly planted Everbearers. You will
still get a late-summer/early-fall harvest off of them that very same year. Everbearers put out a few berries at a time over a long period of a couple months and are better suited to fresh eating.
Junebearers are managed in an
entirely different fashion. I won't put Junebearers in a raised bed because they are just nuts about sending out runners. Most of your U-picks raise Junebearers and because of their high burst of production, these berries are more suitable for canning/preserving. From my small established patch last year I harvested 11 gallons of berries. After that I got tired of picking them and turned them over to the neighborhood kids. I put up lots of
Strawberry Freezer Jam. Summer in a jar! It's all that's gotten me through this long, dismal winter.
Now on these Junebearers, when I first started the patch with newly purchased plants, I spent all spring pinching them. It was very time consuming and next time I might not bother. They won't bloom after that, but then they go into runner mode. Once the plants had established a good root system, I let them go ahead and produce runners. On Junebearers, you WANT those runners, because they are next year's bearing plants. Although I would let the first year plants alone, on all following years, you will be tilling under the plants that had produced this year and you let those new runners get established to be NEXT year's bearing plants. You only keep a thin row of the new runners. All that time for roots to be established is already accomplished in that Summer/Fall period in which they were runners. By next Spring, they are strong and ready to go. After that first initial planting, there would be no need to ever pinch again. As long as they are disease free, you keep that stock and keep the cycle going.
Soooo...I think if you give your Junebearers good soil and good growing conditions, you should be able to get away with not pinching them. If you have a field of 1000's of them, of course you're not going to waste your time pinching. If you only have 25-50 new plants and you have the time on your hands, you do get a little advantage by pinching them. Everbearers, I firmly advocate pinching.
My go-to book on strawberries (and every other berry you can think of) is
"Successful Berry Growing" by Gene Logsdon.
Hope that this has been some help here in exploring the mysteries of How, Why and When to pinch strawberries. Ultimately, it's not the end of the world, whichever way you decide to go.
But yeah, if you're just growing them for fun or for your kids, I'd say no harm, no foul. 
Still dreaming of spring here!
