Yes of course, there are nice plugins for WordPress, to allow custom avatars, and to fall-back to Gravitar if they aren't present ... in classic Loop-fashion. I do see websites out there running on WordPress and using personal avatars, alongside Gravitars. Matt is not sticking pins in their voodoo-doll.

Use 'wordpress plugin avatar' in your fav engine, or 'avatar' in WP-plugins.
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It was already obvious before the Gravitar company came along, that people use different avatars, in different sites, and even in different contexts on the same site. Etc, etc. Assets & services were selected & tweaked to best-serve particular roles & contexts.

And obviously, the same applies to Comment Forms & systems. It's so obvious, folks are glossing right over it. Jeff - right here & now - is proud of the results of the effort he has put into optimizing & customizing the WPTavern comments-system, to best-serve the specific goals & purposes of this site. And quite rightly so.

The next site you go to, the priorities may be different, and a different Admin may be equally proud of the entirely different kinds of comment-form customizations that she has built for her site ... which has an entirely different focus & goal-set, than Jeff works for here on the Tav. And so it goes from site to site, all over the Web. It only makes sense, doesn't it?

Why would we want to part with this kind of flexibility & adaptability? Only for the same reasons that we were sweet-talked into parting with a superior avatar experience, for the ho-hum Gravitar version. Because there is a valuable business opportunity in play ... if the gambit actually succeeds.

I want WordPress-Automattic to succeed. I can put up with some moves that don't do anything for me, if they help solidify the enterprise that Matt heads up. I know that not everything will work; that Matt competes with the biggest & toughest on the planet, and he will sometimes get his butt kicked.

The Gravitar story, and honestly to all appearances, the off-site comments story, is water under the bridge. Much more compelling dramas now dominate the stage.

The off-site comment-systems story was just the same-ol' Gravitar-movie footage, with nothing changed but the sub-titles. And the studio isn't even accepting scripts for that franchise anymore.
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It's a cool-game today, people. Social-Mobile is winning, strictly on cool-points.

Form over function. Style over substance. Look where function got Drupal. WordPress was cool.

Avatars were cool, before Gravitar turned them into a boring tracking-tool. Places competed, for cool-points, on their avatar-specialization. You can't collectivize avatars, the way the communist USSR collectivized their farms, and expect the results to be cool.

Comments can still be cool, and they are in many places. We can win cool-points for our preferred version of the Internet, by putting effort into the solid, simple WordPress comment-foundation.

We won't advance on cool-points, giving Comments the Gravitar-treatment.