Ohhh, you ppl don't go out very often do you
Blogger was relaunched on Sunday with a new and improved look and feel.
The templates are all new and done by some of the biggest name in the xhtml + css business brought together by Douglas Bowman of StopDesign.
Dan Cederholm
Todd Dominey
Dan Rubin
Dave Shea
Jeffrey Zeldman
An excellent "summary" can be seen here
As to why the html work is done on blogger server...
That is the practical solution, all is done from a centralized location, almost no setup required on your part on your website, you just supply the ftp user/pass combo and blogger takes care of the rest.
Among other things one of the new stuff they introduced is the ability to blog through email, not a new concept but a new one at blogger, the subject line becomes the blog topic and the body becomes the blog.
I have a personal blog but as it's in Icelandic I doubt you'll enjoy it much
You can take a look at a overview picture of my BSc project that I'm doing for Icelandic Telecom.
As I'm spending to much time doing websites the main blog pages I read are from the guys I mentioned earlier in connection with the blogger redesign.
http://www.zeldman.com/
http://www.simplebits.com/
http://stopdesign.com/
http://www.mezzoblue.com/
Other frequently viewed are
http://www.kottke.org/
http://www.1976design.com/blog/
PS
I'm not up early, I'm up late printing out these fun reports I've been doing over the last months, about 500 pages in all