altho google hangouts seems better, talking conferencing with a room full of people with mic-speaker setup seems to work better with skype. something to do with AGC and controlling feedback better. maybe hangouts fixed it but it didn't work a year ago.
Hangouts works very well for this now. Well, Chromebox for Meetings (the business version of hangouts group chat) does. It has hardware support for encoding/decoding and generally does a much better job of it than just trying to use 1:1 hangouts via browsers.
That said, it's still far inferior to any commercial videoconferencing product I've ever seen. Literally, the only advantages are cost & integration with other Google services (which is only an advantage if you're already a Google Apps customer).
