it's doesn't sound very smart policy, if you ask me, I can see that easily backfiring, unless your game is so unique that there are no alternatives.
Unless you're WoW or LoL or WoT that has a unique breakout appeal, it almost certainly is a dumb strategy. That is why so many MMOs start off Steam and end up coming to it anyway (FFXIV, ESO, Rift, etc).
It is the identical phenomenon in reverse with the CK2 news of 1M units sold. Steam helps games by giving them a common ecosystem to perpetuate and cross-polinate each other. It's a very well understood phenomenon called the network effect where each additional point connected in a network (Steam user, game, etc) makes all the other points more valuable. Niche games like CK2 benefit the most from Steam for this reason.
I would guess EA is seeing the impact of that in Origin which is why they are now giving out so many free games to get more users in order to justify being away from Steam.