Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the quote from The Verge is the following: "Singhal says Google had to make the difficult decision to drop the very 'open' XMPP standard that it helped pioneer."
That's for the new Hangouts service. If you can keep using XMPP with your Gmail account, then it's not that terrible. I don't know if it's a forced replacement. We may need to wait for Google's announcement.
Are you kidding me? All of this fuss with people annoyed at Google when they haven't even announced or explained it?