Yes, inside gmail if you wanted that. Alternatively, inside hangouts in a browser. The Hangouts app on Android was also a possibility. All synced, all showing the same chats/SMS side-by-side.
I had some very minor flakiness with receiving certain SMSs with Fi/Hangouts, and various anecdotes on the internet suggested not using it for SMSs as a solution. For me, that didn't make a difference, but it's like they've given up on whatever complexities there are around unifying, and going back to two lowest-common-denominator siloed applications.
Another part of it is probably that Hangouts / google chat is a channel (network) that they completely own, whereas SMS is a generic, third party protocol, and history tells us that XMPP, MSN/Yahoo Messenger integration, Facebook RSS feeds etc can't last because each company wants to be the sole owner of a walled garden, and not a slice of a larger pie.
I had some very minor flakiness with receiving certain SMSs with Fi/Hangouts, and various anecdotes on the internet suggested not using it for SMSs as a solution. For me, that didn't make a difference, but it's like they've given up on whatever complexities there are around unifying, and going back to two lowest-common-denominator siloed applications.
Another part of it is probably that Hangouts / google chat is a channel (network) that they completely own, whereas SMS is a generic, third party protocol, and history tells us that XMPP, MSN/Yahoo Messenger integration, Facebook RSS feeds etc can't last because each company wants to be the sole owner of a walled garden, and not a slice of a larger pie.