Does anyone know if you can chat with other people through pidgin if they do not have pidgin at all on their end? It does not say on their site...

Pidgin dosn't require it's own account, as long as you are using the same network as them you can talk to them (MSN, GTalk/XMPP, AOL)

You can also login using several different networks at the same time (right now I'm logged into MSN, GTalk and Facebook (Facebook needs a seperate plug-in)