Absolutely, I meant to add above that the 23andme dataset has huge value due to its size. Also you bring up a good point about potential easy access to participants. If 23andme allows researchers to contact people who were of interest to their particular study and ask for more information, which could be as easy a questionnaire, that could be incredibly valuable. I don't agree with the above commenter that 23andme was a failure. Genomics is still incredibly young and we are just getting to the point where we can have an impact on the average persons life.

As for the 1000 genomes project, it was funded with government money (I think mostly the NIH, although the UK may have been involved too) therefore the data is free and open. The data was generated using illumina sequencers.