It's overblown as in people worry about it too much. Unless you have some rather special I/O needs that involve a ton of writes, the flash outlives its usefulness. At my work we use CF cards very heavily for photos and still have a few from several years ago. These things see over a hundred photos per week, I'd say. It's actually tough to say exactly because we have a bunch of cards and they do get rotated (we take hundreds per DAY sometimes). All of the post processing is done writing to the cards too. I don't recall ever having one die.

How exciting are those 256MB CF cards that are still working strong? I think that I've thrown away some 128MB cards because they were just too small and very cheap to replace with 2GBs. 😀