jc

Ben Guild had the exclusive on this one: set up a Jabber account in a Jabber-capable client such as Trillian (?), Proteus, Adium, Fire, or iChat. Use your Gmail address and password (of which by now I'm sure everyone has at least one, if not I've got invites to burn) and where it asks for a server, use talk.google.com. That's it, but Guild has screenshots and maybe more instructions.

Rock on.

Edit 03:44: so ars technica's speculation was right on the money with the Gmail integration and Jabber, and says the LA Times had the story first.

Edit 04:15: Got my first message, a system message from "gmail.com":
[04:14:03] The broken link has been fixed. Thanks for being our first users!
Guess that means talk.google.com is now live...

Edit 03:58: They totally missed the boat on a really cool name, which I'll use to refer to talk.google from now on:

Goober!