Aside from being punished by Cheetah et al, the bloggers may be punished by Google et al for having duplicate content. If they SEO their blogs (and Wordpress is great for SEO), this will hurt unless all content has a cite tags around it.

We were thinking of canonical links and backlinks to the original article, what do you mean by cite tags ?
As for cheetah we don't think it'll be a problem if you reach to them to get into their whitelist.

The biggest impediment to spreading Steem is the one week delay to get an account. Most people can accept an email or text verification. Steem requires both which is fine. The problem is then waiting a week!

Ah yes the good old user registration problem. Hopefully it'll be fixed with the mining soft fork that's coming next where people can mine for their accounts.

Why is that important? The best way to spread Steem would be to allow content (text, images and video) and comments to be written onto the blockchain rewards to be awarded on other sites and apps. That happens on Dtube and others but these sites are only for Steemians because you have to work to be one.

Totally agree, steempress is only the first step here, in the future we want to reach a full integration where you can directly upvote/comment on the blog and it communicates with the blockchain (with all the underlying effects)