I personally would love to see it be a self-contained irc/xmpp/jabber/faye server, but all in good time. We want to make open-source beautiful, easy to access, and easily extensible. So we're releasing what we have now, with plenty of momentum towards things like providing an XMPP backend!
I am happy to see IRC here. Way underused communication method! Certainly are things that can be improved with the protocol and services, but few people understand how useful it can be for business aswell as personal chat-needs.
May I just put forth a preference for the backend to be based on ejabberd? Perhaps the folks at Process One would be interested in collaboration, as they are a significant contributor to the project.