Four things come to mind:

1. Blogs can save drafts prior to publishing
2. Blogs have setting to add an image in a standard location
3. Blogs have a short description setting
4. Blogs have a widget to provide the title, image and short description

While I find blogs to be the most misused Elgg core content type, I still allow them primarily for the Blog widget. 

Core blog plugin doesn't have the option to have a thumbnail or preview image but that can be fixed with another plugin.

Thanks!

Core Blog Plugin is better than pages. It has better SEO, which is why spammers target blog posts on elgg networks. Besides that, there several add-on for the blog plugin that make it nicer and modern.

Pages are good for information about the site.

One of the special features of Pages is that you can allow also others to edit the same page. There are two settings: 1. who can see it, 2. who can edit it. Blog has only the first one.

Also you can create subpages and see all the pages and their subpages as a tree structure.

RJ,
Which blog plug ins should I know about, and which do you recommend?

Are there plug ins for pages?

Just a thought: it seems to me that the functionality of blog and pages overlap.

From a development perspective, would it make sense to add the page features that are not already available in the blog to the blog plug in?(ex. multi author editing/collaboration, sub pages, tree structure)

Ed, How do you feel blogs are misused?

Here's a relevant prior discussion. "Page vs. Blog" https://elgg.org/discussion/view/604620/page-vs-blog