In equal measure I hate pre-order exclusives for both existing and for "ending up free later anyway"
Pre-order bonuses, especially when they're exclusive to retailer are fifty-two shades of stupid. They punish the consumer for not researching something fully that the publishers themselves wont fucking tell you about, you simply have to visit each store and hope they've bothered to include their pre-order bonus if they have one in the description.
Also if it's going to end up free anyway wtf makes it exclusive? I'm happy to not have to pay and even happier to have non-exclusive content but if i pay to get something early so i can have a bonus "exclusively" only to find out i would've gotten it later anyway, I just wasn't told by the damned publishers, then that developer can fuck right off in future. Exclusive early-access should be a new term coined for games offering future DLC as pre-order incentives imo, especially as by the time it's released you couldn't give a crap about having a different shade of yellow on your assault rifle or whatever
Look at Batman Arkham City for example. Depending on where you bought it you got either a Exclusive Joker's Carnival challenge map, a Penguin's Iceberg Lounge challenge map or Robin as a playable character.(Which they don't mention is only useable in challenge maps but was fairly obvious in truth) Also there was an array of places you could get alternate Batman textures as well.
So which do you buy? One of the map versions? Personally I wanted the Joker map but if i pre-ordered for that i'd have to pay significantly more due to the store marking it up, same goes for the Penguin map(though that was a "collectors edition" or something) the cheapest pre-order i could get was the Robin one and I always kinda preferred him in theory anyway so I got that. Shortly after the games release Robin is offered as paid-DLC, no mention of the maps. Did i miss out?
Nope, turns out, against the odds, i made the right choice, the Joker and Penguin maps ended up getting released bundled, everyone who bought the pre-order with one or the other had no choice but to pay for both to get the other.
It took a ludicrously long time to release however, far longer than most people were still playing the game i suspect. Why can't these things be announced properly, upfront, by the publishers, isn't that their blasted job? It's like publishers just want to make the whole purchasing process tiresome.
Don't get me started on the recent Mortal Kombat game that had different bonuses depending on which country you are but had identical descriptions/prices but far poorer quality products to offer.
As for Origin, I'm not touching that with a barge-pole once i've finished playing BF3. It's been a massive pain trying to perform the simple task of playing a game simply because of that arbitrary bit of software and i refuse to go through it again.
