It's not just the store cut. From what I understand, a big part of the motivation of Origin was also to avoid having to compete, at least in consumer perception with the sales. Battlefield 3 at €80 while it was a year old looked terrible value when Borderlands 2 had dropped to €50 and was regularly 30% off despite being only a couple of months old.
That seems backwards to how the actual customer perception worked out though. I very quickly noted that Origin prices were worse than Steam prices, and avoided it. If that was their intent, they forgot the storefront itself has a perceived value.
