Awesome. Maybe someone will make a good desktop client for Wave, which if you ask me, is needed for it to replace email.

I agree. Wave is complex enough that people are going to want to use their OS's native interface with it, for both usability and speed reasons.

Email isn't that complex, and I still prefer using Mail.app to Gmail's web interface.

I think you mean complicated not complex, but either way gmail's advantage isn't only the UX, there are many other advantages of the mail being hosted on the web. I think for most these other advantages far outweigh any UI/UX considerations.

Me too, but we're in the minority.

I'll be happy with a good emacs mode.

Interesting. Is this at the point where one could just buy a slice, run a server, and play around with the client or is Google holding some piece back until they open up their implementation to the public?

The most I've been able to achieve is to get the server running with Openfire (but it would probably work with ejabberd too). I can verify that it is connected to the external components part of Openfire, so I believe the server is setup correctly. I have also been able to get the basic example client they include running, but it did take some hacking, and I have not been able to successfully connect to my server yet, much less work with waves. I don't see ANY web-gui code in any of this, so I seriously doubt it's what you're looking for. If you want to setup the reference server and play around with it, you can now do that, anything else is iffy at best.

http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/wiki/Installation instructions just went online

Is it me or 20k+ lines for a protocol implementation sounds like an over engineered system which is bound to fail?

You can downvote me to infinity. Google is a company and as such it is only interested in earning money, everything else is second.

Pretty sure it's because you wrote "M$", not what you said about G¢¢gle.