Unite with Skype?

Over the last few days I have considering moving my IM over to Skype. It just seems to make sense to use one tool for both calls, video, and IM. I know other people have made this transition.

I of course, see some issues with this:

• I have over 230 contacts on MSN, everything from friends to customers to co-workers to family
• I don't want to teach my mother how to use Skype. MSN is hard enough for her
• I have lots of history saved with MSN

Has anyone managed to cut MSN out of their daily use by using just Skype? How was the transition? Any tips or tricks? Or just keep running redundant applications just in case?

It's too bad that the MSN, Yahoo, Skype and all the rest can't get their act together and get some real interoperability.

Carriers are more then happy to let people roam on their networks, or send text messages between people with different carriers. Of course the key difference between carriers and IM providers is that carriers charge fees for text messaging and usually have extra charges for roaming whereas IM is perfectly free.

Would you pay extra for an IM client/service that offered interoperability between the various IM networks?