Nice article. Few thoughts:

WordPress.com & Akismet is mostly free. It costs them a ton of money to maintain the infrastructure. How good is their cash position? In this climate of recession, their burn rate is what I would be most concerned about as VC fundings are harder to get.

WordPress is not very cooperative (barely tolerates) with commercial plugin or theme developers and relies on people to donate their time & labor to the community only for free. Today we mostly moved away from developing WordPress plugins and down the road I am sure others will too. Let's see how many people are as willing to donate their labor & time for free when the economy is crumbling all around them and the "day-job" of these moon-lighters may be at stake.