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Google Talk uses straight XMPP, so any XMPP-capable IM-client should suffice. And there are lots of those.

I don't see a problem with this.

One of problems, definitely not a big one, is accessing messages sent to you while you were offline. You have to sign in to gmail to grab them, because you want be notified about them via XMPP. (Assuming you have turned on storing of chats.)

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