My thoughts exactly.

It’s press release material, not grounded in the real world - for most bloggers, at least.

I just tried to upload an mp3 on my free wordpress.com account and was directed to this message:
What filetypes can I upload?

Currently you can upload the following files to your blog: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt.

With the space upgrade you can also upload: mp3, avi, ogg, m4a, mp4, mpg, mov, wav, and wmv.

So this “upgrade” is useless to me. And it doesn’t offer “free” space for my intended use.

Wordpress has been, currently is, and always will be the BEST! Matt has great direction for the product and the driving force behind it is SOLID.

Hosting your own server using Wordpress scripting is a different story but most self-hosted WP blogs I’ve seen are just as pathetically plain looking as the next.

No matter how many page-views or visitors a Blogger blog may get, the very name connotes amateur hobbyist and for the most part, the alleged aesthetics WP claims to provide are laughable.

A “free” blogger has no right or expectation to continued service and the “free” provider has no obligation to provide it.

Six Apart’s TypePad is not being “left in the dust” by anyone. Blogger? Who cares. *yawn*

If I do my maths correctly, it means that Blogger has been offering 1GB to its user. Compare this to the previous “50MB” from Wordpress. That makes a 20x difference. There’s no big deal offering “only” 3 times the amount of storage.
IMHO, storage is definitely not a competitive advantage for blogging platforms. It’s nice to have more than 50 megs, but more space doesn’t mean better service. I do think Wordpress.com kicks Blogger’s ass by just being a better blogging platform.

Speaking of personal blogging, I’ve been lovin tumblr lately. We will definately stick with WP for our main blog though.

I agree that rich media like flash videos is better done by Youtube & Vimeo.

For images, many people still prefer to have it on their site instead of flickr (I mostly do).

For PDFs, the red headed stepchild of the web for documents. I can only think of uploading to the server for sharing to readers on a website.

I am 100% regarding:
Storage alone won’t make hosted WordPress a more attractive platform than Blogger and TypePad.

“You still need a space upgrade to upload certain file types, like movies,…”

So my 3Gb storage can be used for anything except video and whatever “certain file types” are.

Think about it for a second. If you self-host the images to your blog, and upload 5 1-meg images for a blogpost about some photos you took — you’ve wasted 5 megs. You can do that 9 more times. EVER.

Or you can host your pictures elsewhere, and make everything much more complicated (what if you move them? are you prepared to update all your URLs to hundreds of old blogposts)? Some people prefer integrated picture uploading, others don’t.

But now it’s a true option that is a sustainable-for-life option, whereas before — 50 megs is NOT going to cut it for a life’s worth of blogging.

People shouldn’t have to state the obvious. But maybe you didn’t know that because you don’t use wordpress? In which case, you are definitely NOT the authority.