i made comments using my email without registering and some months later when i created an account for that email address the comments where never claimed to me
1. Something happens
2. Someone links to the 'something' blog
3. Someone else links to TechCrunch which is just now catching up
4. Comments are made in the TechCrunch submission about TechCruch not really even being involved in 'what happened'.
Still, they have wonderful content creators and a number of their blogs (Deadspin, Gawker, Jezebel, io9) have very large and active communities. It's not the smartest thing to rock the boat unnecessarily.
It gets pretty unwieldly on the bigger sites (Gizmodo, Gakwer, and LifeHacker) when there are hundreds if not thousands of comments. The position now is basically the attraction isn't the discussion of the posts but the posts themselves. Things might change soon though.