Part of the value was that the dumps were updated weekly.
Say you're using it to get a list of named entities (proper nouns). The purpose is to cluster news stories about a given entity (if you look at Facebook's Trending News, each headline begins with a proper noun followed by a blurb. Not sure if they use Freebase, but it could be a useful input).
The value of Freebase will decline over time as the content becomes out of date.
The Wikidata dumps are also updated weekly; see [1].
Wikidata RDF exports are made every two months or so from those dumps and are available at [2]. I imagine that frequency will pick up. You can generate your own RDF exports using the Wikidata Toolkit [3, 4].
from the article:
> The last Freebase data dump will remain available
and even if it wasn't, I'm sure archive.org will grab a copy (if they haven't already).