Perhaps they're starting to think that for all the costs of running Origin it hasn't been as profitable as they hoped it might, and are testing the waters with Steam again before drawing conclusions about what to do next - if they see an uptick in sales combined with stats showing that more people buy on Steam than they do on Origin perhaps they will decide it's pointless to keep running it...
Personally I'm not too bothered either way - I've got quite a few games on Origin - to begin with I got it for Battlefield 3 which was all I used it for for ages, but then got a key for Dead Space 3 in a humble bundle and redeemed it there, and since then have added a handful of games when they were giving them out for free. Certainly have never really considered it as anything more than a simple launcher I have to boot to run certain games though - barely use the friends list etc. or check the store pages... I didn't really like them keeping the games off of Steam but then again they were mostly in-house studios/titles so it made sense why they would