You must be kidding. There are tons of blogging CMS systems around. The world isn’t just wp or blogger.com

For personal installations there’s not that many. WordPress and Typepad are the classics and Typepad is much less powerful than WP.
If you’re talking about free online CMS systems then yes, there are quite a few. From Livejournal (and derivants) to scienceblogs and whetever else. That does not take away from the comparison I made.

but wordpress not having comment preview is also a pain in the behind. How do I know I did the blockquote cite=”” right? Ah yeah, I will find out once I posted my comment

This is one of my gripe with wordpress.com as well but I’m hoping they will eventually implement something. However this is easily fixable in a self-hosted wordpresss installation since you can use both preview and edit plugins (indeed some themes come with it built it) or you can use something like Intense Debate as I have started doing now (you only see it in new posts or ones without old comments.)

Anyway, have fun there! (found your weblog through Planet EL/LAK)

Thanks and don’t be a stranger

only to find out if someone might have responded to that comment of mine on a 3 months old post?

Well I consider these requests quite low and small compared to a normal http request for the page itself. I’m guessing also that if you close the comments of a post after a while, new http requests are refused.
Still, a self-hosted wordpress gives you other options as well. There is both a plugin for notifying by email (subscribe to comments, I had it but disabled it recently) and/or you can outsource the comments to something like intense debate and let them handle the horrible load

If you need to follow a conversation you should subscribe to the commend feed.

So I will generate hundreds of HTTP requests into the indefinite future (since: “when do I stop requesting that feed?”), only to find out if someone might have responded to that comment of mine on a 3 months old post? I don’t like that approach, neither as a commenter on foreign blogs, nor as a weblog owner and server admin.

As, I mentioned above, this is a power that you only have with wordpress as it’s AFAIK the only pure blogging CMS available for personal installations.

You must be kidding. There are tons of blogging CMS systems around. The world isn’t just wp or blogger.com. For a remote example, I’m using a bored up COREBlog on Zope – something like one of those motorbikes that its owner rebuilds on weekends and has changed almost every original part in it.

As for the comment feature: blogger.com sending you to a different page for commenting indeed suxx, but wordpress not having comment preview is also a pain in the behind. How do I know I did the blockquote cite=”" right? Ah yeah, I will find out once I posted my comment

Anyway, have fun there! (found your weblog through Planet EL/LAK)

And while I do agree that commenting is better in wordpress, the other features should have a nice fat “IMHO” beside them.

Well, seeing as this is a blog, I think this goes without saying

I can’t comment on the admin interface, since the last time I actually saw a worpress one was back in 2006; I believe much has changed since.

And I fail to see what you can do with wordpress’ extras that you can’t add in a blogger blog.

But anyway, I should stop defending blogger now; I am looking for a way out myself. Just not the obvious one.

But if you take only the free services’ offered features, wp.com is better only in trackback tracking, while it lacks on the customizability front:

You have got to be kidding me. This post just listed a bunch of features that WP.com has over blogger: Trackback, comments, admin options, community and extras.