Adam Kalsey and Lockergnome have been working on DrupalCPP/Gnomepal*: an install profile for Drupal that provides an integrated social publishing platform. They've already released one (extensible) module - Activity Stream - that aggregates a user's online activity into one place.
This might be the pressure that Drupal's core programmers need to deal with some of the issues that still hinder Drupal in this kind of environment: WYSIWYG and collaborative editing, sites with millions of nodes (memcache, optimised queries, etc), usability, an abstracted admin interface, structured publishing...
Together with Dries' push for test suites for Drupal 7 these efforts could finally produce a professional, structured publishing environment that's as easy to use as Wordpress.
* Bit confusing, that name, perhaps.