I'm in roughly the same position, and the absolutely frustrating thing is that they had (on gchat) the largest chat network at precisely the point where chat-over-IP started to skyrocket in usage. But then Google spent a year (apparently) willfully chasing away users from their communications products through obscenely incompetent product decisions over the next decade.
I spent almost half a decade at Google, and I _know_ that their product people are fairly competent, but the company is so badly run on the product side (in terms of incentives, etc) that product at Google has the emergent property of being extremely, extremely bad at what they do.