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So basically it is a clone of FreeBase

It sounds like Freebase to me, which has been around for years.

"In the past, a Web developer tasked with building an online store would most likely do so using a dedicated e-commerce system, instead of a content management system (CMS)"

Exactly how far in the past are you talking, because MonsterCommerce (bought by NetworkSolutions (yuck)) has been offering a e-commerce storefront CMS since 2000.

Interesting thing I came upon at freebase. Apparently they cater to the crowd that wants to know whether something is a lube or not: http://lubenotlube.freebase.com/

Will Google be able to make Metaweb work on their omniscient scale, or was this just Google making sure a startup doesn't become yet another player in search?

Wrong and wrong, you see Google is freebasing now:
 

The web isn’t merely words[, or water-soluble,] it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities...

Sometimes you have to give it a good ole "smoke-test" to see the possibilities...Google should be careful though, the path they have chosen is a slippery slope!

I've been using Freebase integrations on a couple of sites, and the possibilities Freebase already offers for rich metadata integration is HUGE.

For example, a couple of their simple API samples are a list of Police songs from the Synchronicity album, ordered by track length, or Graduates of Stanford born since 1960 who are board members of companies

I've been using Freebase integrations on a couple of sites, and the possibilities Freebase already offers for rich metadata integration is HUGE.

For example, a couple of their simple API samples are a list of Police songs from the Synchronicity album, ordered by track length, or Graduates of Stanford born since 1960 who are board members of companies

Go and look at Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/
They provide an API to obtain articles and structured data from them. They handle all of the wikipedia import.
Additionally, you can do much more with the structured data there
For instance - Olympic Cyclists and the Way They Died.
http://www.freebase.com/view/user/doconnor/default_domain/views/olympic_cyclists_and_they_way_they_died Try doing that with Wikipedia.

Go and look at Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/
They provide an API to obtain articles and structured data from them. They handle all of the wikipedia import.
Additionally, you can do much more with the structured data there
For instance - Olympic Cyclists and the Way They Died.
http://www.freebase.com/view/user/doconnor/default_domain/views/olympic_cyclists_and_they_way_they_died Try doing that with Wikipedia.

Obligatory Apollo 15 snap:

http://www.freebase.com/view/wikipedia/images/commons_id/2076065

In many mays, I believe Freebase is a better platform for different kinds of trivia. Not only do they not delete data that isn't "important", they also organize the data semantically, and have fancy API:s to get the actual information, not just the text, from the database. This makes it easy to write applications on top of that data. The semantic data seems to be incomplete quite often (there is also a plain text description imported from Wikipedia that of course is quite complete), but that isn't something that couldn't relatively easy be fixed with a few more users.

I'm not saying Freebase is The Best platform, just that if Wikipedia doesn't want the content, give it to someone who actually do want it. And you get some extra benefits in the process.