From the sounds of it EA wants to find a few likely/good sounding mods and help the teams get them ready to go with the intial release of the game. So they can both provide mods from the getgo, and seem to be like they're supporting the community. It seems likely that they're doing it to help them compete with HL2, dunno if it'll work though.

I suppose I sound cynical as well, but look at what modding support they offered when BF1942 came out and after and you'll understand why.

But anyway, i've gone kind of off-topic. If CA tried to do something similar the game would have probably been delayed any longer, or shipped in a worse state. They/Activision just don't have the resources EA/Dice can toss around to do that sort of thing.