It's amazing that on a place like HN it seems like most people just don't get this.
The vast majority of communication happens on products that:
1. Don't even have a desktop component
2. Have no "status" indication (oh noes!!!)
3. Are completely closed ecosystems
And yet you never see posts about how WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, etc are horrible because of the above reasons.
World is a big place and in some areas (like mine) all the services you mentioned aren't popular at all. I doubt 1% of communication happens through them.
People around use gtalk and facebook messanger. They used to use GG (Polish product, some time ago most popular here) and Skype but most of them switched to either gtalk or fb.
Maybe you don't see complaining because services you mentioned didn't come about as replacement for traditional chat clients integrating most important features of those only to get rid of all this in one go once the user base switched.
It's the difference between must have features like the ability to communicate with people you want to talk to and features like desktop/status/etc that are nice to have but not essential. The tech community demands perfection and obsesses over anything/everything while normal people just use what works.
Most of my friends switched to gtalk from our previously most popular messenger (it was gg in Poland). From I see around they also made a dent in Skype usage. as chat client. Maybe it's alrtenative universe but that's how things look from my perspective.
Sorry for the mocking tone -- I edited my original comment. It's easy to forget people are in very different environments and that affects our perspective.
If you're still thinking of gchat as a desktop AOL Instant Messenger replacement then I can see that products that seem to operate that way are disappearing. The way people are using chat products is changing drastically due to mobile. I would say AOL-style chat isn't going away because Google killed the competition -- rather I think demand for those style systems is just dwindling in favor of multi-platform, multi-modality, multi-party chat clients (picture/text/video, desktop/tablet/mobile).
Ha. I can see your environmental bias: AIM? AIM in Europe came late and never really took off. Here the first popular IM was ICQ, then MSN, Yahoo and local projects (c6, gg etc), then Skype, then WhatsApp/FB/Hangouts etc.
I agree that classic desktop IM apps have changed anyway, except in the enterprise world (where MS and IBM still ship horrible, horrible stuff).
Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, Instagram, Skype, etc.
If anything gChat is a struggling platform that didn't make the transition to the mobile era -- that's the entire reason Hangouts exists.
Edited: to use more polite tone.