The hardware limit of 8 seems strict, but really its not like that. The current A6 engine does lighting all in one pass, and only 8 light positions for the whole scene are passed for rendering.. there are ways around this, and if you look on the A6 forcast page, they mention a new light management system in the works. This will, i believe, get around the 8 light limit by calculating 8 lights per vertex or entity .. what this means is, rarely will you have more than 8 lights affecting one vertex.. so if you calculate light positions for n number of lights, you can also somehow stick a tag on each vertex that says which lights affect it. So while each entity can't be lit by more than 8 lights, you could theoretically have an unlimited number of lights on the screen at one time.

This is of course one way around the limit, the otehr is through vertex/pixel shaders as mentioned before. But frankly, calculating more than 8 or so lights per vertex in any method is slow and requires multiple passes. Basically this light limit is not a real problem, just needs some imagination to get around.

In any case, remember that you can as many lights as you want, just cant have more than 8 on at one time, so you can have a script that turns off lights when they are a certain distance fomr the camera.