I now have confirmation that it wasn’t “just me”. According to this thread at the WordPress.org support forums Google has recently changed their API, so the wp-admin/import/blogger.php file must be modified in order for the import to work (thank you andy!). As I have already succeeded in importing my blogger blog to WordPress (self hosted) using the wordpress.com workaround, I have not tried this solution. For anyone having this problem, reading through the thread at the wordpress support forum should give you some direction on how to proceed.