So when Battlefield 3 was switched mid-development to primarily a console game, they defended the PC version with all the additional capability offered by PC (graphics options, playercount, etc). But when another studio of theirs makes a barebones port, they don't want to add anything to the PC experience (despite how trivially even a midrange PC runs the Dead Space series) out of some high-minded concern for parity between consoles and PC.
Pick one EA, or just admit that you haven't a clue what you're doing from game to game on PC.
Dead Space 1 and 2 were completely vanilla ports as well, why this surprises anyone is a mystery to me.
I don't think anyone is surprised. I just find it amusing that EA went to the trouble of relaunching their service (and sacrificed thousands of sales and goodwill from their Steam customers to do it) but apply no consistency to their own PC releases in terms of features. One would think these premier games they use to draw people into the service should be treated with more care.
They talked a big game about their service, but they clearly don't even care that Battlefield has something as obvious as controller support while another Origin exclusive of theirs (mass effect 3), a game built for controller, has none.
Then why put the effort into a service like Origin at all?
The usual EA reason: desperately trying to brute-force spend themselves into a currently successful market (Digital Distribution services) with no understanding of it. See also: acquisition of Playfish (chasing Facebook market), acquisition of PopCap (chasing casual PC market), impending switch to freemium (chasing F2P market).