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No backups. Unreliable uptime. And of course, no self-hosted option.

If you invest yourself in your blog and take time out of your life to maintain it properly then it's not unreasonable to expect control over your work. If Tumblr goes down for half a day then that means nobody can visit your site, and if you have something that needs to be posted as a matter of urgency then you're stuffed until it comes back up.

Plus, what happens when Tumblr goes out of business?

This is a bit strange. I migrated my blog from Tumblr about a year ago, and at the time there was an easy-to-use XML API to retrieve posts -- presumably the one that powers the many "hacky third party tools that purport to do it".

I suppose it is disconcerting that Tumblr don't just let you export your data from the dashboard, but it's not at all difficult to do, and it's not at all hacky.

It's not difficult or hacky to you - but you read and comment on HN.
Totally agree with both of you.

Tumblr is one of the simplest api's I have ever worked with, though. To decide not to use it because there isn't some one-click dashboard csv export or migration tool.. that's such a weird decision. That's like saying I don't want to use [redacted social networking site] because it doesn't feature [one-click-tool] to move to [alternative redacted social networking site]. I mean, I guess. But, if your concern is about ownership of the data and you're treating their service/app as a datasource, I'm sorry but you're going to have to get your hands a little dirty to export that data into your preferred format.

bear in mind, it's Gina Trapani writing this. She should know how to use an API.
Setup pingdom (or another monitoring service) on a Tumblr site and you can witness the other bigger issue with them.
If you consider Tumblr to fill some of the same space as Twitter (albeit in a more media-rich way), it has roughly "industry-standard" uptime. =]
I don't see what's wrong with "hacky third party tools". From the looks of it, the api seems to allow for you to pull your posts, 50 at a time.

However, it is a bit concerning that there is no built in tool for laymen. It seems like tumblr needs more hires.

I think the worry is that the third party tools might stop working at any time and/or the company might pull or change the API that allows it to function. If it was an official feature from the company, it's continued existence would be a bit more assured (although not perfect).
Tumblr also has some other awesome features you may not have noticed.

My favourite is tag pages only up to 15. So if you have 300 items under a given tag, you can only sort of see 225 (at 15 items per page).

http://cl.ly/3s1g0z2S3Y2n3e1L0q3U

Someone else might find this screenshot quite ironic. A response article, "Why Tumblr" and Tumblr failing to display it.