It’s not about features. Nowadays, I’d go with a self-hosted Open Source application from the start. In fact, that’s what I am looking for at this very moment.
I really don't get why this statement is so common. More or less every other hosted reader immediately offered a migration path, so getting out of Reader and up and running somewhere else was really easy.
I have only user rss via gwene over nntp, if that went away, i'd miss it bunches.