Personally, that's what I'd like to see. A cms or email based blog that generates the static files and pushes them to whatever service/host you want (Dropbox, s3, github, FTP, SFTP, etc).
This is what I've been doing, after Posterous announced its retirement: http://code.dealmeida.net/nefelibata. You generate a static website from markdown files, publish it to configurable services (S3 initially, but it's plugin based), announce it to social networks (FB and Twitter). The idea is also that it will collect comments from FB and Twitter and add them to the static pages, so that discussion can happen on the social network du jour, but content will remain forever.
Some of us might even remember that before Blogspot came to, you had to have access to a server via FTP to publish.