It does support multi-person chat. It also makes a great IRC client. I prefer it even over Irssi. But I would love a slimmed down version of Pidgin that used Qt4 instead of GTK2 for the UI, and a few other features but I'm sure I can find plugins for those.
My 5 must-have tools are:
vim or gvim
Pidgin (it's literally a 'must' have. I can't find a better alternative)
Filezilla
Gimp 2.4 (or PS)
and probably one of the things EVERYONE here should have, a good calender app!