Glad I'm not the only skeptic here. It will likely find a way to count towards storage limits, or find some subtle way to try and monetize like charging for history or slapping ads similar to Twitter's discover or promotional stuff that requires add-ins to remove. Honestly once they went to the intrusive format of hangouts / killed gchat, I lost an valuable means of informal contact with a lot of folks who just turned it off entirely. Gonna nurse that one for a while longer.