Now it's over, it's much expensive for them to give for free now and to pay shipping for backplates.
They should ask 10$ more for cards with installed backplate. But probably they hurry to launch cards and didn't want to lose time to wait on backplates until someone finish that. They could lose buyers on that way because waiting. 
If you pay 1000$, little more is not problem. Next time they will give backplate and that's it. Or maybe with Hydro Copper.
Card will be launched later and have time to finish backplates.

emach
No it's not fair.  Why does EVGA owe us a backplate?  Pricing is set by Nvidia not EVGA.  But as a nice gesture they give you a poster, and a case badge.  I will say that the TitanX should have a backplate but it should come from Nvidia.  If EVGA makes one, I'll gladly pay for it.

I agree with you, it's shame that GTX980 reference have nice backplate but TITAN X not, people would be satisfied with same backplate.
And TITAN X is hotter and more expensive and backplate is really welcomed. Now EVGA will launch, now worry for that. 

I think the only reason that the manufacturers doesn't want to put a back plate in the early release of a video card is that...
They are afraid there are potential PCB flaws, because the cards are not tested openly with users yet (different users have different needs). They will want the card to have more concrete foundation in the market first.(More user experiences with no issues)Then they will release back plates for whoever that wants one...usually only $10 or $20 dollars more. If there are PCB issues, they are most likely going change the design of the PCB, which will make the previous release of the back plate useless.
 
For example. (from my sources) the GIGABYTE R9 280X video card have some potential video ram issues with early revisions, REV 1 and 2. That they have to change the entire PCB design over in the REV 3.. And now the users are not having as much issues (RMAs) with that card...
 
Example 2, I had 4 EVGA GTX 970 FTW video cards. All of the video cards had coil whining and high pitch noises while running benchmarks and games. The fans quite loud when running in mid-high RPMs. This card didn't come with a back plate. But there was short promotion that if you purchase the card, EVGA will give you the back plate free. Then it comes to the release of the EVGA GTX 970 FTW ACX 2.0 + video card. Which it did come with a back plate and most of the coil whining issues are gone.
 
In this case the GTX TITAN X is a reference design card....a "back plate" will usually comes with those high end cards from Nvidia.
 
For reference cards...there is really no market for those cards because they are released for such short amount of time...
 
The bright side of this is that...at least the manufacturers are more into the reliability than looks.