I liked QLive before they forced 30 second commercials on server joins for non-subscribers. :(
It was cool being able to casually browse to other tabs, then going back to qlive and finding a game. UT for example had an integrated IRC client, but people preferred using mIRC and having a ut://123.123.123.123 protocol they can just click on to join a game. Don't forget having to minimize all the time to chat to someone on MSN while playing a game. So there are some benefits to having a browser based interface for a game, imo.
