What is Apple planning to do with iChat? if anything. If nothing, then will there be an alternate rendezvous chat client?

So there I am going through my hard disk looking for old stuff and I realize that I have iChat and I say to myself, whatever happened to iChat. I feel like it was a very promising technology that seems to have been almost completely abandon by Apple. I really liked it in so far as it is a great IM client, there are all kinds of little annoyances, like no groups, the away message doesn’t work and the like. But its a good product. Any idea as to if Apple intends to continue developing it. If they don’t, do we have to abandon Rendezvous IM’ing?