What’s the big deal about Sphere?

I keep reading about the Sphere beta on a number of different feeds that I read. Now, I’m not on the beta test for Sphere, but is it so radically different from what’s already available that it deserves all of the buzz it’s generating? This post today on Data Mining simply says that we can now search with subhour times. So basically Sphere has caught up with any number of other blog search engines already available. From what I’ve seen Sphere looks pretty, but it doesn’t look revolutionary. From my point of view, just being better than the other currently available blog search engines out there isn’t going to be enough, especially after Yahoo integrates blogs into their normal search results.