"The only problem that I could see is the possibility of being penalized for duplicate content, either by Google as it relates to indexing my blog favorably, or by a SteemIt bot that may mistake a duplicate post for plagiarism and flag me."
I can't speak for the Google side, but the main bot that would get you on the Steemit side is cheetah. That won't be a problem though, as it doesn't flag you. Reply to the inevitable first comment from cheetah and link to your blog - they'll add you to the whitelist and cheetah will ignore you from then on.
Oh awesome. That's easy enough. I will definitely be looking into this.
The ability to create content with a WordPress WYSWYG editor and have it syndicate right to SteemIt is huge in my opinion.
At least for me it is. That would not only be a big timesaver for me, it would allow me to get a lot more visibility.