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The overwhelming majority of warriors and paladins I know went blacksmithing. This is very understandable because it allows you to create your own armor and weapons and save the money of creating them yourself. I did this too, but about halfway through I started to wonder if it was really worth it.

Smithing is one of the most difficult professions on World of Warcraft. It requires the user to find a great deal of metals, smelt them down, and forge the armor. The biggest problem is the sheer volume of metal you need. You often find yourself using 15-20 bars of your respective metal to get just one point of skill. And very quickly you grow out of the normal patterns and start needing rare and expensive gemstones to complete your work. To make matters worse, most good armor and weapons are only built from rare and expensive patterns.

I personally found it so much easier to find other master blacksmiths and give them materials and tips for the use of their skills. If you give them mats, very few craftsmen will refuse to make something for a tip, no matter how small. It usually comes at no cost to them, so it's free money. You can sell the leftover materials on the auction house and get yourself much more money.

Of course when you hit endgame, you can make some amazing armor sets only usable by master smiths. You can also finally make money, and lots of it, crafting and selling great weapons. I would wait until you're a high level and can easily afford the costs of smithing, and quickly gather the materials. Until then, gathering professions are great for making lots of quick and easy cash.  

If you're a warrior or paladin or even death knight I think it can be argued to keep up with it. It's extremely helpful at the beginning of end-game levels as the weaponry is often what you're after. It gives you a huge advantage on the gear table. In addition, Wrath is also adding cute little bonuses to professions. For blacksmiths, my understand is that they shall be able to permanently add an additional blue socket to any of their own weapons. This process does cause an un-soulbound item to bind to them so you can't just have a blacksmith friend do this for you. You must do it yourself and therefore be a blacksmith. It's kind of a nice little perk (again, especially helpful for the tanks as the blue gem socket has the pure stamina gem).

That's a really nice bonus! Blacksmithing really starts to become useful as you get into endgame and that's about the point where it's well worth going back for it if you've missed it. In my power-leveling new character strategy, I usually cut out anything that will cost extra time and just gather/sell mats, but if you're willing to put forth the time and effort, it will probably save you some time in the long run to just keep up with the smithing. If you have some money and are leveling an alt, you should definitely max out those skills as quickly as possible. I guess it just depends on how you want to play the game.  

So I followed through Blizzcon via MMO-Champion and discovered that they changed the blacksmithing bonus. Don't worry it's just as cool.

 "With wotlk, we're trying to make all the professions applicable to end game. bs can socket gloves and belt. glove sockets are for your self only. theres going to be end game viability that everyone can use."

Hmm, useful ways to enhance belts. I never thought I'd see the day. I like that it seems they can modify the belts of others but only their own gloves. That lets them make some good money and help themselves. Sockets are especially useful since they can be socketed with gems to help any class and spec. It looks like they are making a lot of really good improvements on the expansion.