After briefly conversing with a coworker, here’s my first impressions.

The Good

Minimalist.  I hate the teen-ified feel of MSN and AIM.  What the fuck is a nudge and why would I ever do it in adult conversation?

Input buffer – seems to not have a reasonable limit.  I hate copy/pasting into MSN only to have half of it cut off, and have to go back and copy the other half.  GoogleTalk buffer test was the entire home page of whatever blog I was reading at the time.  Nice.

Voice – I need to test this with someone later when I get my headphones.

Custom Status Messages – Simple, but I miss these with MSN.  Yeah, you could use the “personal message” but it feels like a hack.

The Bad

It’s new.  It doesn’t “feel” like “my” chat client at the moment.  That may change because I am really digging it so far and will probably continue to use it.  I’ll post on the voice later.