Blogger vs. Wordpress?

Lately I've been thinking about switching this blog from Blogger to Wordpress. There are a number of reasons--e.g. Wordpress seems more flexible and I prefer the "feel" of it--but foremost among them is the need to keep a back-up of the blog. As I've now got over 350 posts, with numerous helpful comment discussions among them, I'd be very upset if a server error, hacker or some other catastrophe wiped all of that out. But Blogger makes it very difficult to back up your blog directly. The third party programs I've tried are intolerably slow and I'm not even sure I'd be able to use the data they collect if I ever needed it. Wordpress, on the other hand, can be set to send you backups automatically, and also allows you to create and use them manually, with little trouble.

The big thing holding me back is the fear of losing my work in the process of trying to save it: As I understand it, you can transfer posts from Blogger to Wordpress fairly easily, or so they say, and supposedly it is also possible to transfer comments, but a lot of people seem to have problems with that, so I'm not sure. If I can't transfer both posts and comments reliably, then its not worth switching to me. But even if I can do so without headaches, transferring to a new platform would require a fair amount of work, it would wipe out all my incoming links and google traffic, and it would force people to update their readers, blogrolls, etc., so I'm not eager to do it unless there is a significant benefit to be had.

So I'm wondering: those of you who have used both Blogger and Wordpress, or switched from one to the other (and I know this is true of at least a few of my readers), do you think it would be worth switching over, why or why not? If so, any advice on how to go about it?