Valve has never been hated by gamers as much as EA, though.
Oh it was
I recall when you HAD to use Steam to play Counterstrike and Halflife 1. The hate was huge because the system was way worse than what EA have now. It was buggy, slow and destroyed the user experience without at the time any real user benefits.
Over the first few months/years they improved the system dramatically. For the last few years if you told someone Steam used to be unusable nobody would believe you! I would personally give EA the benefit of the doubt as I have seen a service turn from hated to loved before and that was Steam.
Their licensing terms on Origin are pretty much the same as Steam and nobody hates Steam. If they make some improvements then it could be a good boost for all gamers.
Companies tend to slow down with innovation if they don't have viable rivals so Steam having competition can only help all online services improve which is a good thing in my view.
The only problem EA have is that is popular these days to assume EA is evil even if they are acting like everyone else. The "Origin is spyware" myth is a good example, there was briefly a bug which they fixed but apart from that they actually report slightly less information than Steam do.
If you notice for example Steam collect stats on what applications you have installed not just Steam installed apps. These stats come from Steam checking your Applications folder for what apps you have installed. However when EA did this it was called spyware.
Anyway as the saying goes the truth is in the eating so lets see what happens
Edwin
(Comments are my own not my employer etc etc.)