It does now. I just saw it for the first time just now.
Honestly, it's an improvement. Google has been pushing Chat into the Gmail client for a while. It makes it super cluttered and hard to see your labels (aka folders), especially on a small screen. Generally, the reading view has always been too wide, way past the recommended number of characters in a line. You have to reduce the window size to read any email with long paragraphs, so on most screens, giving up width in the reading area is not an issue. But cluttering up the folders sidebar with chat made the whole thing difficult to use. Much better now.
