I personally love WordPress self-hosted because that makes me independent to whatever I do. It's incredibly easy to build an awesome site no matter you have creativity or not. I can start from scratch or choose from thousands of amazing themes and add functions by my own to the theme files. That's why I choose WordPress for my other sites.

On the other hand, WordPress.com is awesome for those who don't want to mess with any kind of technical stuff but just focus on the content. For personal blogging, I don't think there is anything better than WordPress.com.