Major problems of being blind, aside from the whole "How the hell do you travel?" :

Heal checks become a pain in the neck, stabilizing friends is near-impossible.
Potions are only useful if you know exactly what's in them.
-4 penalty on all strength and dex based skills
No spot checks (though it's fun for the DM to ask you for spot checks anyway).
Everything in the world is treated as Invisible to you (You're flat-footed, they get +2 to hit against you, and I THINK you draw an AoO every round... can't remember where I read that last). Blind-fight helps cover this.

However, having a good Listen check is fantastic for covering your bases - there's a feat I think in the PHB2, Hear the Unseen, that lets you pinpoint someone's location with a DC 25 Listen check, and gives a +5 bonus to listen checks to locate invisible opponents... or something to that effect. Skill Focus : Listen becomes far more important, and Blind-fight is near necessary in combat. If you decide to go for the full penalties of being blind, try to convince your DM to give you those three feats for free - or at the very least, Blind-Fight, and possibly Hear the Unseen. The full penalties for blindness are incredibly rough, it's certainly a flaw worth more than one feat.

Alternatively, when I was rolling a blind monk a year or so ago, Bears with Lasers suggested that instead of going through the full thing of being blind, simply roleplaying it (as in, no spot checks, etc), and "flavoring" my misses as being the result of my blindness. I don't like that option, myself, I like to have things represented mechanically, but it's certainly a do-able option, and wouldn't require taking such an enormous hit to your effectiveness.