>>3
Most RSS feeds don't report items older than a few dozen entries, in the interest of saving bandwidth. Google Reader has been around for a long time, and since it was developed as a web service, Google was able to archive a lot listings from now-unavailable versions of RSS feeds. This means that if you open the feed of a popular blog in a purely native or self-hosted web reader, you're missing a hell of a lot of links to articles that you would be able to easily see on Google Reader.
Even worse, if I am not mistaken, Google Reader had a lot of deleted blog posts and such archived that are now going to be thrown in the trash.
Lastly, it's just kind of sad for the whole RSS ecosystem. Google Reader managed to suck all the air out of the room for everyone else by being both free and superior to everything else available. RSS had become a very mature technology (hell, Google Reader has barely been updated at all over the years, and I was still turning other people onto it continuously in that time), and Google is pulling the rug out from under all of us, just to benefit their Facebook clone that no one gives a shit about.