i happened to open ichat package contents last year, and there were a lot of interesting stuff (potentiality). look there to see what ichat can do one day.
in the article it explains how msn messenger has supporting video over IM for a while now, i used to use it a lot as my boyfriend (mrjamin) and i are long-distance, so we used to wave at each other n stuff through webcams, it was cool. i miss seeing him on my computer now i've got a mac- we haven't been able to get it to work properly over yahoo yet, even though my webcam works ok with macam drivers. here's hoping you're right and iChat 2 will have videoconferencing capabilities