I agree. Meebo, for example, works on nearly as complex an architecture as Twitter, but they seem to be scaling well.

I'd say far more complex.

Media coverage? I haven't seen anything about Twitter on the New York Times or CNN or any other media outlet targeted at "the average person". Even mainstream-leaning "tech" sites like Wired or CNet haven't been covering the outages/scaling problems.

People who read sites like TechCrunch most definitely know what Twitter is, and coverage that talks about why they have scaling problems as opposed to making a soap opera about it is very useful for that demographic.

Probably never will? The average user may never use a Twitter like platform for banal updates or short, passionate discussion. However, simply sending mass messages to groups is powerful. For example, Pownce's calendar feature is very helpful for sending open invitation with a cal sync to large groups.