Nice! Paying a premium for this was a bummer, but it does still work better than all of Skype's competitors, in my opinion. The primary problem of Hangouts and whatever else is out there is audio echo. I don't know if that problem is simply unsolvable in Flash or what, but Skype has handled it much better. All you need is one person on your Hangout call who doesn't mute their mic and the experience is a disaster, unfortunately.
That's a difference in the audio algorithms used. Skype uses SILK while I believe that Google Hangouts uses Opus. SILK and Opus are closely related however. I would assume that Skype didn't allow all their fancy echo-cancellation tweaks to be open-sourced so it's a little better in the Skype implementation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILK#Opus
