Do the same rules and consequences apply for the new Comments blocks here as for the rest of the site?

yes, they do and always have

EDIT: see below - consequences NOT the same but the rules are

my concern was how much more difficult it will be to determine if a comment is a chat violation because it's not an answer to the question but a comment under an answer

I posted this in the SB a few weeks ago trying to figure it out

http://suggestions.yahoo.com/detail/?prop=answers&...

one thing I know for sure, as I put in my thread, is that you do not lose 10 points if your comment is reported and deleted so there would be no appealing of a deleted comment

honestly, I have reported quite a few comments in many sections, and as with reporting of questions and answers, you start to get an intuitive feel for whether a comment is a violation

you also get an intuition that the comment under the answer is going to be a violation based on the answer and the question in general, which is how I've found violations in comments (I most certainly don't click on every single comment posted LOL)

I have deleted ones that were insulting the answerer, giving out email addresses, including solicitations, links to spam

I have also left many comments myself, a few of which, in hindsight were kind of rude - I asked a TR contact of mine to delete them but he couldn't take them down

you can't edit or delete your comments so I am more careful now

Just a guess that the staff have not even considered what users will try to get away with. In the politics section, an answer of "just another republican thought process" would almost always be a violation as an answer. But if that is the comment to an answer, it is not chatting or insulting, it is a legit comment. But is that what the staff intends the site to become? When somebody asks "Who is a good horror author?" and somebody answers Stephen King, can I then add as a comment "Poe is better" instead of adding an answer? Is the comment going to become a way of legitimate, but obvious dissing others? In the old system, we would need to say "To answerer #1, Poe is better." which would get you a violation often for calling out other users. Now, the staff have given us the mechanism to call out specific users. I think the staff will need a revisit once they see the cleverness of the users.

Of course people will say they're the same.

But i feel they're are basically loosening up the strict interpretation of chatting by allowing a reply instead of a new question-aka(answer) to reply to a prior question.

I'm pretty sure yes

That would be a yes. Your thoughts about this are right on track.