Google+'s video chat barely works for me at all. Maybe it's because I'm in Europe, but the video chat is basically a big blurry mess. Skype is worlds better.
Gmail has also been offering a cross-platform "Google Voice & Video Chat" for some time now. Hangout will probably be a rebranded version extended to include video conference support.
"I know too many people who..." - this is not comment that adds anything new or interesting to discussion, it has 0 value to me or anyone here but if you provide valuable info about problems you see in Skype's technology or quality and how is G+ better, that + your honest opinion would be appreciated.
I have not used Google's hangouts. I'm on Arch Linux, so it'd be some work to do so; I cannot hazard opinions on it, but I was implying that competition is good.
My parents use Skype to talk to my grandparents in Russia weekly; I use it at times as well. I'm grateful for the technology. That said, it's not nearly as seemless (for me) as the phone, even beyond issues of finicky hardware (I'm on Linux, I don't expect much there): phone calls drop, frames stutter or disjoin from the audio, sound might warp, and so on. These are all things that sound like software issues (yeah, my pipe is only so big, but one could degrade more gracefully). I'm just hoping competition can improve things a bit, in a way that giving Skype even more of a stranglehold on the market would not.
I'm in UK. I was totally blown away by Skype's video chat on Christmas day when I first used it to chat to parents. Few drop outs but better quality sound than a phone call and video ... "we're living in the future" as they say.
