Does it come with end-to-end encryption yet? It's a strange world we live in where I feel my data is safer in a Facebook app than in a Google one.
Aral Balkan's talk is a highly effective explanation of this problem. Of course, it's not that popular here given how it exposes the "big data"/"free" malware that is popular in Silicon Valley. Just look at the apparatchik in this thread, talking about features when they should be talking about how to set up a proper federated (and encrypted) protocol.
Why else would Google disable many of the features of XMPP federation? Allowing federated XMPP servers wouldn't give them the surveillance data.