In reply to Jeff Chandler.

It's really already a separate entity, operating on it's own development timeline and it's own goals while still being intertwined. WordPress.com is the biggest application built on the back of WordPress the open source project. When you hear people in other open source communities (Drupal, etc.) who claim WordPress isn't suitable for building a scalable web application on top of they obviously aren't paying attention because that's exactly what WordPress.com itself is. That is the beauty of WordPress itself and what it has become.