When you have social networking websites like facebook with realtime chat services built into the website itself, picture/video upload services, friend lists, etc etc. Not many people want to carry on using a purely text-based chat service.
+1
I'm not even going to bother debating the point again, I stand firmly that I would use the feature if it was added, as I'm sure many others would.
Services like Mibbit are becoming very popular, to users that have never used IRC before (and people that have).
There's certainly nothing wrong with expanding IRC's capabilities, even if it is using a DCC connection, not many people are terribly happy with early implementations of IRC, so it branched and grew, this is called evolving.
Adding video/voice support to IRC clients, will, if anything, allow IRC to evolve further.
