¡¡¡¡Yes, SEO blogs used to deal with other aspects of web strategy. Content has often been taken for granted and thus on page optimization, web design, usability and link building took center stage all the time.
¡¡¡¡Blogs are just like any other webpages. Their only advantages would be the fact that they normally contain up to date content with is updated regurally. If google detects that your website is updated every day or more than a couple of times a week, it is more likely that your website will be indexed more often. This leads to the knock on effect that your pages will start to appear in google's main index quicker than other websites. Blogs lend themselves to being easily updated, but something similar can be done via a forum or an archived newletter or just adding standard HTML pages every few days.
¡¡¡¡Blogs do offer a "pinging" feature, which can contact search engines, to say that they have a new post. These engines like Technorati or Google's Blog Search can contain details of your posts/new pages withing minutes.