User blog comment:Jenburton/Coming Soon: Message Wall in Labs/@comment-954127-20111025011503/@comment-1724320-20111025024335

I agree that we need serious forums, more than anything MediaWiki can offer us. The official response about talk page replacement is:
 * This does not affect article talk pages, article comments, or forums. While we hope to improve those communication features in the future, we’re waiting to see how Message Wall works for users before we make any plans.

However, forums based on Message Wall are already being developed.