That's not necessarily bad. It just means someone thought that it was more important for the interface to be easy to discover than it was to keep it clean.

In my opinion a good IM system needs to be both easy (as it targets a mainstream audience that needs to voluntarily adopt it, a trouble that MS's offerings never had) and powerful (as it quickly becomes a big part of your day to day). Not the easiest tradeoff to design to.

The clear upper hand granted to the former in this product release is pretty telling of Google's conundrum: they need to gain adoption over everything else.