There's a new flavor of Google Talk:
the Labs edition, a desktop client that looks very similar to the
Google Talk gadget and has most of its features. The application doesn't support voice chat or file transfer, it's still Windows-only, but it has some new features: it lets you launch Google Calendar and Orkut, while including notifications for Google Calendar events and Orkut scraps. The new Google Talk uses WebKit to render some parts of the interface.
I don't find too many reasons why someone would switch from the full-featured client to the Labs edition: group chats, smilies, tabs, while the missing features are more important. A better decisions would have been to integrate these new features in the desktop client, instead of releasing a separate application. Now we have four different flavors of Google Talk: the original client, Gmail Chat, the gadget and the Labs edition.
{ Thanks, ebass5str . }