Yeah, how dare they support a company-related product on their home page? How dare they be popular and use that popularity to promote things they want to succed?

"If social media becomes a widely accepted way of doing business, how then does it "disappear"?"

It gets rolled into advertising, marketing, and PR. Today's social media experts, for the most part, are moderately tech-savvy entrepreneurs, temporarily filling a market void until traditional advertising, marketing and PR people get hip to the new media technologies. The smart social media firms will look to merge with an existing traditional advertising, marketing or PR firm, before those firms start competing on a large scale.

Yeah, there is someone working on updating the WP.com stats plugin to have a Dashboard widget.

What I'm looking into right now is whether we can hide the "Turbo" link in the header if Gears is enabled and synced, that way the nag only persists until you give in and use it (totally worth it... it makes the Visual Editor so much faster to load!).