I successfully moved my blog to a dedicated domain during the weekend with very small cost. Here is what I did for the migration:
1) I signed up for a three-year free hosting promotion from 1and1.com. This promotion is terrific as it offers 500MB storage space, 5GB/month traffic, 50 email addresses, multiple tools (CGI, Perl, PHP, FrontPage extension, MySQL, etc.), 100MB MySQL space and various other high-end features for nothing. (I'm quite confused as how this promotion will make business sense for them.)
2) I registered two domains, pfblog.com and another domain, via 1and1 @ $5.99/domain/year. This is a very cheap price indeed. (Compare with verisign.com, it takes $25/domain/3 years.) The new domains are up and running within 24 hours.
3) I downloaded the latest version of personal blog publishing software MovableType 2.64 from MovableType.org and installed it to my domain in 1and1 without any major problem. (It takes around 2 hours of work.)
4) I migrated my blog from blogger.com to the movabletype database. (It's easier, taking 20 minutes.)
5) I spent around 3 hours today to customize lots of movabletype templates, especially the cover page, the archive files and the single log view.
I'm very satisfied that I can own my own site with virtually no money (this is my first personal site). I'm equally satisfied that I can get rid of the ad banner mandated by blogger.com. I need to admit the installation and customization of movabletype tool requires some technical expertise (basic knowledge of HTML programming and FTP especially).