Patti,
I totally agree, but I needed it to work a certain way, and the site I am working on is launching next week, so I did not have time to wait around and try to find another solution. I contacted Shopify and this is the way they explained that it would work, and it works great.
First you use the product discount app (http://apps.shopify.com/product-discount) to create a hidden duplicate of the item you want to give away for free. It creates the hidden duplicate at $0 retail, this way customers can not just go and purchase however many they want for $0.
Then you use the product upsell app (http://apps.shopify.com/product-upsell) to set up the criteria. If your purchase is over $69 and includes one of these 4 products you get product X for free. It works really great, once you hit the threshold, and you go to the cart, the customer receives a pop up asking them if they would like the free gift to be automatically added to their cart.
See attached how it looks in the cart.