It seems that recently with all of the splogs and abuse fo the glog and ping strategy that if you choose to SEO a blog - expecially from a free blogger or WP account then it will take much longer to be viewed as a trusted site.
It seems that Google is also trying to guard its search algorithm a little more carefully than MSN does by "hiding" certain links and therefore preventing webmasters from gaming the system.
Yea, it seems to me that MSN will include many backlinks into its algorithm that Google will not include or at least not weigh very heavily (example: reciprocal links) but that is just my observation.