I agree with what I think that you and other people here are saying: the Apache CouchDB project will continue to be supported by a good community so there is very little technical risk for using CouchDB. BTW, I think that datastore as a service companies like Cloudant, MongoHQ (and many other good companies) are a great convenience, but for self hosting, I wonder why anyone really needs support for CouchDB, MongoDB, etc. unless they have very large deployments.
I think it's a little unfair to lump Cloudant in with MongoHQ and label them a "datastore as a service" company. You should check out what they've done with BigCouch and their annoucement today about how they will be committing the BigCouch changes back into CouchDB proper.
