One has to think if some of the webhosts being recommended are purely because of they payout based on affiliate or referrals.

Yes, they've replaced the old affiliate hosting page on wordpress.org with one geared more towards .com here, presumably because they wanted the revenue to go to Automattic rather than Matt personally. The customer experience after departing wordpress.com is not really their problem; they've already got their $99 and their referral cut. The dodginess of some of these hosts has never impacted on Automattic's credibility before, and there's no reason why it should now.

I do think they're taking advantage of the ignorance of their prospective customers. WP itself is fairly complex these days, and if you're comfortable with the plethora of menus and options on wordpress.com you shouldn't really have any trouble navigating your webhost's control panel. Dreamhost already includes all the free wordpress.com themes in its one-click installs and it wouldn't surprise me if the others are doing the same. I reckon I could get a carbon copy of my wordpress.com blog up and running within ten minutes, but obviously if somebody else is doing it all for you then DNS propagation is going to make it look like a much longer job ;)