XMPP or the protocol behind Jabber has a new friend: Google Talk. This is good news for instant messaging interoperability, because XMPP uses a decentralized model like SMTP, but still Google Talk does not have server to server support (for example: chat from a gmail.com account to a jabber.org account), but I think this is not far away.

Now, my recomendation to the Google staff, add a lot of emoticons to your client and a lot of people will simply move in droves, because regular users does not care about the protocol, only the coolness factor.