You're correct that you'll depend on another service for all the niceties, but I for one am super excited about decoupling all of those services from the connection itself. Hopefully it'll lead to a lot more competition and innovation in the space.
At the very least I hope it forces IM apps like Skype and Facetime to support WebRTC (that is possible for native apps, too, right?) so that in the future we get interoperability between them.
Wouldn't it be nice if WebRTC pushed video-calling into becoming like e-mail, and you could take to anyone, regardless of what "video-calling app/service" they are using?
> Wouldn't it be nice if WebRTC pushed video-calling into becoming like e-mail
WebRTC doesn't define a signaling protocol. There are already protocols for that. SIP, XMPP/Jingle, etc. It would be nice if people started using them more. WebRTC only defines an offer/answer API (which is actually a big difference!)
So having two different services use WebRTC doesn't mean they'll be interoperable. (Unless the services intentionally make an effort to federate.) Any third-party attempt at interop between incompatible services is going to involve spoofing a connection to each service. While that's not impossible, WebRTC really isn't the interoperability panacea that people seem to think.
