You might have observed Google blogs like webmaster and analytic and all other blogs having top level domain in .com. Now if you would open the same blog, you would get redirected to country specific domain rather than top level. This means google has changed one more step in its algorithm and given priority to Geo specific result. So ideal scenario can be considered, if you have different website to target audience of different countries, It would be good to target audience of specific country with country specific domain.

Yes, We have seen it and I think it will devalue lot of blogs. It will also confuse lot of people because people may consider a blog no matter how good, is country specific.