I personally have not been able to get Pidgin to do audio or video calls that work with or without the 'purple' plugins.

This depends upon what you want to do with your Google Hangout contacts, text chat, and or audio, and or video calls? To do text chat, you can use Pidgin and or other chat messaging application clients, to add your Google account information without using the 'purple' plugin, just use the Google Talk or XMPP option (add the pidgin OTR for secure chat).