Anyone who has been following BF3 knew about this already.
It's pretty annoying, but it's not a big deal. Origin is just a download service (as of yet... it might change into a more Steam-like system), so you can just download from Origin or D2D or buy retail, and load the exe on Steam as an external game and play with the overlay and everything just as any other game.
At this point, EA isn't really competing with Steam... they're just not cooperating. It's annoying and pointless unless they start actually competing seriously, which is dumb on EA's part, sure, but competition is always good for the customer.
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_foolmo_
mobile computer