Earlier quoted context omitted.
"if someone had just jammed XMPP and SMTP together" - wasn't that kind of what Google Wave was aiming for?
Yes. And the vision for Google Wave was great . The execution was just abominably bad (primarily on the frontend/UI side), and Google's failures in execution carried over reputationally to the—now dead—Apache incubator.
Wave suffered from a UI that was a mess layered on top of a protocol that made it really hard for people to get started on experimenting with alternative frontends, and without a user-base giving people a reason to persist figuring out how to interoperate with it. Had the protocol been simpler, the UI mess might not have mattered so much - people might have come up with their own ideas.