Thanks for all the replies. I agree with the reasons to block it but IMHO it really doesn't matter if your a normal home user. Our enterprise does block it but when I am at home playing my video games, I can care less if someone decides to ping me.

Thansk Soggy for the link. I am pretty familiar with the different ICMP packet types.

Nebulas:
How is it harder map map an internal network if your only blocking echo requests from the external network?