Came here to post this. Although MT was a far more mature and better product, the licence shenanigans just drove everyone away. It was as though someone in MT just thought, "Hey guys, how can we alienate every non-paying user?" and ran with it.

Matt and co were very shrewd, had a 'good enough' product and got a few high profile bloggers to switch (and be vocal about it) and WordPress became the common blogger's tool. By the time 2.0 was released it became fairly ubiquitous for blogs, and people added stuff from there to make it a fuller CMS.