So, where/how do you get a dump of your DNA, anyways? I suppose it must cost a pretty penny, too?
The cost of sequencing decreases by a factor of 10 (!) a year per base pair. I will wait until it's cheap to sequence my whole genome, before I'll shell out the money.
(Synthesizing also gets cheaper by around the same factor. But it started from a higher level of cost.)
If and when they offer the service for a complete sequence, I'll probably pay the money again, just to have a complete record.
Some highlights:
Both my fiancé and I are carriers for a mild form of Hemochromatosis, so we have a 1/4 chance of having a kid with it.
I am a little bit Asian! That's probably the Jewish ancestry. My fiancé thought he had a black ancestor but it turns out was 100% European. My best friend, whose father had always told her that her grandmother was Native American, found out he was lying to her (which did not surprise but did disappoint her.) Also the heat map of where your mitochondria are from is fun; it confirmed what I knew already but it was still really cool to see that the first migration of my maternal line out of Greece was with my grandmother.
But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Part of what makes 23andme so fun is you get to learn a lot about biology from the framework of your own genes. Each SNP they report on has a bunch of information associated with it. It's only boring if you aren't interested in biology.
The cool thing about 23andme though is that they're always rolling out new stuff. There is a separate, more detailed ancestry break-down in their "labs" (a part of the website for experimental stuff) but it's not very good. Part of the problem is that there isn't enough research pinning down large swaths of the genome to more specific areas. So what 23andme does is use user reported data- which is problematic due to globalization and limited by people's knowledge.
The only other things that are good and can really pin down geography are your mitochondrial DNA, like I mentioned, and the Y chromosome.
For my friends in systems biology it's now almost cheaper to just send their microbes in for sequencing than doing their own gel electrophoresis.
(If you want to read around in Wikipedia, also have a look at Southern blots and Western blots, and DNA microarrays.)