I think I misunderstood your question then. You CAN install the disk version to the hard drive if that's what you're worried about, but there is still a disk check involved which means you need to have access to the Awakening disk whenever you want to play.
It's not like the Oblivion expansion pack where people just borrowed the expansion disk from someone else, copied the data to the hard drive, and then used their standard Oblivion disk to play all the new content - without ever needing the expansion disk ever again.