I disagree.
In fact the main reason I don't use IRC as much these days is because of the plain and uninteresting interface most of the clients have. I know mIRC can be customised and can even be scripted to support emoticons with the support of DLLs, but that's a lot of work to make a half decent implementation. For example, most of the current ones use HTML and echo line too long errors when more than a few emotions are displayed because they do a simple $replace(string,: $+ $chr(40),<img src="smile.gif" />)
It wouldn't be all that hard to add as far as I know, because the mIRC text windows are already graphical windows, and would shut up the constant requests for emoticons as well as make mIRC much more appealing to those from IM backgrounds.
