I wholeheartedly disagree.
Chain.com is something I have been hoping to see for quite some time now, personally.
I run a "Bitcoin service", it calculates the future difficulty level[0], it's just not all that important to require the constant running of a full bitcoind node.
After I completed the Bitcoin version using the blockchain.info API, I realized there was literally no stable API for Namecoin and was forced to place the namecoin difficulty estimator on hold.
The minute that Chain.com implements their namecoin API, I will be subscribing.
Not because I don't have the competance to build and run a crypto coin daemon 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I simply know that it's a waste of resources for my current needs.