Doesn't seem to be a problem with connecting with Pidgin, and I had it working with Wippien (sadly Wippien doesn't really work great with Win 7 or Linux).
Google has stopped federating with other Jabber services. They have replaced the GTalk Android app with the Google Hangouts app. They have started pushing people (forcibly) towards Google Hangouts instead of Google Talk. How long before XMPP support is dropped? I don't think we can claim that Google will keep it around for certain.