How will Google Reader ever make money? Bloggers will not allow RSS readers to run ads near their content. While I don't think Google will kill Reader, I have to wonder where the revenue is here.
Google has deep pockets. The reason they killed those products was not because they weren't making money, but because they weren't popular.
Your OPML list gives google a pretty good indication of what your primary interests are, which they can use to deliver better targeted ads throughout the ecosystem.
Google likely has fairly strong integration between blog search and reader; it's likely they'd be doing a fair amount of analysis and caching of this data in the first place, so why not build it into a full on service?