Andrew Orlowski 
still hates blogs. Or at least what he perceives as unwanted effects on internet search results due to how Google ranks pages based on links (what he called googlewashing). His most telling quote, to me, is this one
One group is likely to protest long and hard, however: and that's people who have taken advantage of this quirk to use Google as their primary promotion channel or reputation creator. While folk whose reputations have been forged before the dawn of the blogroll will not be affected, and need not worry, the reaction may be predictable. [...]
Just as one-man one-vote democracy terrifies the bejesus out of some people, so surely will a fairer Google.
I think he's vastly overestimated the extent to which bloggers use google to discover blogs. There are a bunch of other intentional blog indexing tools and, once you've discovered the blogs exist, discovering more blogs is trivial.
More importantly, I think he's overestimated the extent to which bloggers write for other people. I write mostly for myself and for a small cadre of readers who I know are checking my pages (e.g. family). I know that other people discover my blog pages while searching for stuff, but I doubt I acquire many new readers that way. (And, frankly, I don't really care.) It is interesting to see the things people search on, but only in a voyeuristic sense.
Finally, I think that, even if Google sets up a separate system for indexing hits on blogs, I think blogs probably do give you a good indication of what's hot, new, and interesting and google will probably continue to make decisions about what other kinds of non-blog pages to show based on what the blogs are saying. After all, I didn't find Andrew's article in Google -- I saw it referenced on a blog.