The comments feature can be enabled/disabled on blog and news posts in general, and also turned on or off for specific posts while generally enabled.
Comments replies are properly nested, so you can clearly see who is replying to who.
Comment posting has bot protection via reCAPTCHA, and spam-flagging via Akismet.
Comments flagged as spam go into a moderation queue at /admin/comments. When comments in the queue are moderated, training data is generated and sent back to Akismet - to help them improve the accuracy of their service over time.
This feature will be moved into a plugin soon.