Fractal did a similar promotion with EBMM a couple months ago.
It was promoted by Fractal as well as EBMM.
You're sort of assuming that Fractal did something other than sell a unit to EBMM for promotional use... They may or may not have done that. We don't know.
As far as the lifespan of the FM3 I think there are a lot of Chicken Littles claiming the sky is falling... Most of the Fractal products have had 5-8 years of full support.
Being that the Axe Fx III, FM3 and FM9 are all using a unified implementation I suspect they will all be supported for a long time to come.
And as for those complaining about a lack of recent firmware update, I'll repeat what I said some time back: my FM9 is still FW 1.0.0...