"Some" people, arguably. Nothing beats email for an easily-referenceable, structured and local/distributed system of record. Slack requires an always-on connection. Catching up on conversations after a lengthy break is far, far easier using email.
Slack is also disruptive in a way that email isn't. Slack demands attention, which breaks concentration on other tasks. Email can be dealt with at the recipient's leisure.
Slack adds persistence, shared sessions across multiple PCs and phones, search, accounts with logins, messages to offline users, image and file hosting, and works even if you're heavily firewalled.
i.e. the stuff a veteran IRC user cobbles together from an always-on server running irssi+screen, nickserv, saved identify and ghost commands, a chatbot and some personal webspace.
Still, I agree Slack is far more the child of IRC than the child of Wave. IIRC Wave had full rich text, a threading-like mechanic, and you could edit other people's messages, and documents rather than channels.
So I want to be clear that it absolutely does not have feature parity with google wave but Asana encapsulates many of the collaborative features of wave in a way that I really enjoy and it is my next best replacement from the loss of google wave
each task has a thread attached to it... I would describe it as "real-time-ish" one of the things that I like about these threads is that you can unsubscribe from them so that you stop getting notifications.