This change was the obvious thing to do, but they should have done it years ago when they announced that hangouts was dead. It was very strange, no one used hangouts because it was abandoned even when it was still better than the competition.
I know google is super unreliable and they kill what you love (reader, wave, etc...)
from the blog post:
It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.
Key phrase: “beginning next week”.
I still use it because it's available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux as well as both Android and iOS devices. My friends and family are on a variety of platforms but we can all use Hangouts. I still dislike some of the changes they've made as it moved from the old Google Talk to Hangouts but being able to follow conversations on mobile and in my browser is great.
I have a few friends who use iPhones and occasionally complain because they want to use iMessage, but a good 30-40% of us can't run it since we don't own iPhones or Apple computers.
It's a great solution, and it'll be a shame if Google ever really gets rid of it.
Also, in Google's defence, no-one loved Wave, and they gave it to Apache rather than vanishing it. (Unlike Reader, which just vanished forever.)
If the world had wanted Wave, it would have lived on, rather than Apache eventually retiring it.
If the interest were there, the new maintainers could have handled repackaging and documenting.
So in essence they have just removed the entire reason for Google's disastrous messaging strategy for the last five years.
How senior heads at Google are not rolling for this I don't know.
It could be another "free for everyone" where everyone means "US only for now". Pretty frustrating when that happens.