How is it not real money? It's simply electronic funds. I can still manually send it to anyone's account and it will act as money. It was given to me recently because of some work I did for a friend. I told her to send it to my paypal account. It's still REAL money and I should still be able to use it to purchase things. It IS the same reason why I was able to purchase things before even though I didn't have a bank account. My real bank account was just used for original verification. I only transferred funds from my account once and it wasn't used for many months afterwords.
Like I said, I've been able to purchase things from ebay even though my bank account was closed. Why? Well I assume it's because I had REAL money in my REAL paypal account. You can talk about pixie dust and crap all day but I know for a fact that the money in my account is real and there is no reason why I shouldn't be able to use it.
I purchased my other items on ebay with that same real money in my same paypal account.