I was going to give it a try (both Origin, to get a feel for how evil it seems, and Battlefield), but never got into the game because I had to jump hrough too many hoops.
I installed Origin, created an account, let it download Battlefield, and hit play, and it opened my web browser to let me choose a server.
That was the first real annoyance. I don't care about making the game 'social', I want to shoot some nameless men. Forcing me to browse servers in a web browser before I launch the game is stupid. Even worse, there's no way to evaluate your latency to a given server while in the server browser. I just picked a server that's geographically close and hoped it would have decent latency.
So I picked a server that looked decent and hit the Join button. Oh, I need a browser plugin to be able to join a game, since the server browser exists only in my web browser. That was the point where I said "Screw you, I don't care enough."
..and then I uninstalled both Origin and Battlefield.
As far as my impressions of Origin go, the interface is rather slick, but lacks much useful functionality. Overall, I see no reason to prefer it to Steam- some commentators have noted that it might not be all evil, acting to add more competition to the game download marketplace, but I don't think that's going to happen.
There are plenty of Steam competitors (
D2D,
Impulse,
GMG...) that rake in agreeable amounts of money on their own merits, without taking advantage of their position as a publisher to lock users into using their service. Even ignoring any other players in the digital game marketplace, I'm much more likely to trust Valve, as a privately-held company, to do 'good things' for their customers than I would EA, the publicly-held behemoth.
Short version: gave Origin a chance, now I surely don't intend to use Origin, nor purchase Battlefield 3.