What about from a security standpoint? How safe are these web applications, and how confident can I be they're not logging audio or video from my calls? I'm not talking about government intelligence security, I'm talking about not appearing in my pajamas on the pirate bay.
I would say, you always have to trust the service provider. While you can manually verify a direct end-to-end connection etc., web apps could always easily change, without user notice. Well, but that's also true for any proprietary app that isn't open source and code-reviewed.
It could be a browser feature in the future to sandbox those webcam data so that it's only transfered to a specific opponent. That has some problems to solve and is just a raw thought.
From a technical standpoint: I believe Hangouts is moving to WebRTC soon as well.