karmic and empathy

[Jared Greenwald]

Ok, so I decided to give karmic a shot since it's due out soon.

Overall I didn't notice much of the improvements (not sure if that's
good or bad) but one thing I did notice was the decision to use
empathy over pidgin.  Can someone explain to me what the deal is with
karmic taking empathy as the main im client vs pidgin?  I mean, I
could sorta get the better messaging system via telepathy/dbus, but it
is worth sacrificing the feature-richness of the previous default im
client?  My biggest issue being that an XMPP account that I used daily
for work doesn't work under emapthy due to the difference in how
pidgin and empathy process ssl traffic for jabber.

- Does anyone know what the downsides of replacing empathy with pidgin
(other than not using telepathy/dbus messaging)?

- Completely unrelated, but something that's getting under my skin
about karmic...  In previous releases, I was able to use the scroll
wheel on an open area of the desktop to switch workspaces.  Not
something major, but something I use all the time.  I assume this is
some setting in the gnome framework.  Does anyone know how to turn
that back on?