It seems pretty unanimous that people want to use steam to manage all there games. It is the largest digital distributor of games for a reason. The consumer votes with their wallets, weather they know it or not. People voted for steam and EA wants to change that. EA certainly isn't making any friends right now with origin and a lot of people are getting mad. I don't know if Valve is a business with morals, but our best interest right now is their best interest. BF3 sales will take a large hit because of this. I will not invest in Origin after I have bought 40+ games on steam. People are taking this seriously because people have a reason to take it seriously.
It seems that Valve is trying to do the right thing. EA wants to make everything proprietary so they can charge and do what they want to the games. Valve, IMO, is saying, "No, EA, you shouldn't do things this way and we wont let our users get sucked into it." I'm sure there are a lot of users disappointed about EA games getting removed from steam, but at the same time Valve is bringing to light what EA is actually trying to do. Valve is making the PC gaming community take a hard look at what EA is doing, I'm sure they are taking a lot of heat right now. It is also making a lot of us choose between what platform to use, who to vote for with our wallets and why. EA seems to be destroying the PC gaming community where as Valve thrives on it.
They are trying to make more money while reducing the quality of service they need to provide to their customers. If you can only buy EA games from EA they can do what ever they want and charge what ever they want. Valve has to provide the same quality of service from many publishers and developers(even letting some small/start up developers sell games) to all users to keep it's license agreements. It does a fantastic job too. I don't like EA's business model, I don't like what they do to developers, I don't like what they are doing to PC gaming, and I don't think they will provide the quality of service that we all expect from steam.
If all it takes to do the right thing is not buy something, that's a small sacrifice to make. I vote for steam, EA will only push users away with this anti-competitive behavior.