Very customizable, and you have every ability to remove comments and such. Take a look at http://blogspot.com and look at the demo.
I'm not talking TWiT level quality.. I'm saying 'better than N8x0' quality. You're better off using your already-better equipment that you DO have laying around. You DO have a laptop or a desktop PC and at LEAST a headset or desktop microphone. Just those two things alone already put you one notch better than the N8x0's quality of audio. Using a good web browser (Firefox, particularly 3.5) with Talkshoe also both cost you an extra $0.
TTS never trumps even a mediocre quality human reading the same news. I would never de-evolve the quality down to TTS unless you REALLY want to simply automate to remove the human altogether for some reason. Certainly not something I'd want in a podcast.