In all my time playing mmo's i have never seen such a way of handling pre-order items.
I do not see why zenimax took this approach or why they do not allow you to just recieve a mail from them on character creation through automated proccess and make this a one time per character thing then if you deleted them you can just recreate the character and no need to waste there time.
Blizzard and ncsoft both use this method along with several other companies why change a working wheel with a broken one i say