iPhone users can react to messages when Android users are in a chat. Also, I would not call SMS a "disaster". It works well for text messages and images. These are the two most important things for most people. Also, I have sent images to Android users and they have never complained about image quality. I really think some people are overstating the importance of iMessage. Does it add some nice features? Yes. Is it amazing? Nope. Also, I suspect that the discrimination problem is more of a people problem. Basically, the people who discriminate will find something else to discriminate on if they did not have iMessage.