That's about what my face looked like when I read that.
So eh, what do you mean "merging Bitcoin with other p2p projects"?
Like Bitcoin+Bittorrent?!

"build the official-p2p-currency" for what? Warez4Bitcoinz?

Well, to start with, integrating it would require there to either be a library, or a standard, and either way when the library or standard was updated it would need to be updated in every client using it.

Next, what if someone wants to stop running bittorrent (for example), but keep generating bitcoins? They can either close their merged client (and then open the standalone client), or they can just use separate clients to begin with... not to mention the same reason integrating an IRC client is pointless, people want to feel like they have a choice. If there is a merged IRC/bitcoin/bittorrent/gnutella/freenet/whatever client, it might be *convenient* for a number of users, but a good numbers of users would dislike certain features in the specific implementation of IRC, or bittorrent.

The same reason some people use irssi and some people use mIRC and some people use Xchat. No one client can please every person, and in some cases there is no "right" design choice. Even if the end result was a completely configurable client, it'd still wind up being bloated to please everyone.

If you want something, you're welcome to build it. An open specification for bitcoin is something I'd really like to see, just because it would allow someone with no C++ experience to do whatever they want with bitcoin without needing to know C++ to hack on stuff :-)

As to the idea of an "official" p2p currency, I could certainly see a micropayments-for-ratio system on a private torrent tracker or the like, and something like that could certainly popularize bitcoin a bit (though probably not in a good way, think "Evil hacker currency undermines US dollar, underground economy in stolen music, software", but no such thing as bad press, right? :p) but I don't really see integrating a bittorrent client and the bitcoin client as a helpful item in a system like this.

To conclude, I'm not opposed to the existence of an integration with other p2p apps, but just asking for it won't get anything done unless you find a motivated dev who *does* want to see the same thing.