Agreed I think on bitly at least you can use some character after the URL - I think its bit.ly/somethingsomething+ (the plus) - and you get a bitly page that shows you where the URL is supposed to land.
I think tinyurl had a similar mechanism.
TinyURL has a feature called preview mode, which allows you to automatically preview any URL before getting redirected without using the extra +. I think it's a nice feature.
IIRC, tinyurl also rewrites URLs to some commerce sites to include their affiliate token.
It used to show you all the click stats too, it was useful to see how everyone's ad campaigns were doing