I was pretty skeptical when I first heard that you could warp between bonfires from the very beginning, but the more I thought about it, and the more I heard about the game, the more it started to seem like a good idea.
You only get the ability to warp between bonfires in Dark Souls when you would have to otherwise do an ungodly amount of backtracking to advance the game. Until you get the lordvessel, the only significant amount of backtracking you have to do is to get into Lower Undead Burg after you kill the Moonlight Butterfly. Otherwise, the path that the game nudges you towards is pretty linear if you're playing for the first time and without the master key, and any backtracking is pretty minimal in comparison thanks to all the shortcuts.
Dark Souls 2, from all accounts, seems a lot more open-ended, with a lot more branching paths available from the very start. If you couldn't warp between bonfires from the beginning, the game would probably have 100x more actual true-blue backtracking than Dark Souls 1. I do dislike that this takes away the feeling of being stuck at a bonfire in hostile territory, far away from areas I'm more comfortable with, knowing that the only way out is forward through intimidating challenges, but the more open-ended nature of Dark Souls 2 probably requires this change. Warpable bonfires from the beginning seems like a bad idea when you judge it within the context of what you know about Dark Souls 1, but this will be a feature in Dark Souls 2, not Dark Souls 1, so it might not be such a bad idea.
Though I do hope there are more areas like the Painted World in Dark Souls 2, where you're pretty much stuck until you beat the boss. That would be a good way to both have warpable bonfires at the start, while still retaining that stuck-in-no-man's-land feeling from Dark Souls 1.
