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Thread necromancy! I want in on this.
DMPC party informs us that we're going to take a quest, or else. Are they forcing us? No, other than tying our characters up and gagging them when they protest. But they're really nice DMPCs, we should love them and do as they say. And they can kick our asses, so we'd better do it. That's one kind of character hook, I guess....... Then they became DMPCs. The difference, to me, is that NPCs are there to make the game interesting for the player. DMPCs are there to show off how cool the DM thinks he is, usually via nerfing, belittling, and/or beating up the PC(s). Towards the end, it seemed like he'd have been happier writing a book about his DMPCs - and, it seemed, casting my PC as a rather unpleasant sidekick.
And DMPC running DM's cant understand why players hate DMPCs.
("Well, my players love them! I wonder why people keep leaving my game.....")
Or maybe we just use them differently? Yeesh.
One truly terrible moment was at a Pathfinder club I attended in middle school, I'm in high school now, so fortunately those dark days are behind me, but I digress. One particular GM was in love with nightshades, probably as it fit his "edginess". At the point of this story, we were all about twelfth level, so reasonably powerful. We were sent to investigate a mysterious portal that appeared in our kingdom. Little did we know, it led to the Negative Energy Plane. The damage from it killed our 8th level bard pretty quickly. Furthermore, we were constantly being attacked by nightshades, which were all counted as advanced because we were on their home plane. Another time, a player was crushed by a mythic ascomid and their body was immediately overtaken by fungal spores, and a second ascomid rose out of it. Needless to say, we didn't let that guy GM us again.