I have met many people in the chat rooms online, and several I have taken to another level by sharing myspace page profiles, or yahoo IM addys and other ways to make a further friend connection. I was kind of shocked when I met people that were in real life relationships offline, that had met in a sex chat room.
Certainly it is the exception to the rule, most people would be hesitant, and righteously so, to even share a myspace page or even and adults only space profile with someone you met in a free chat room. There are certainly many legitimate safety concerns with meeting anyone in real life that you met online, and I would recommend all kinds of safety measures, including background checks, and hiding real information like phone numbers and such (more on that in another post), but there are plenty of cool people to be found in the chat rooms as well.
In fact in many of the sex chat room lobbies, we find people engaging in regular talk, conversations about the world, about life, and after many days of chatting with the same regular people, you start to get to know one another. I have certainly met several cool friends online, and so I guess is it not that surprising that some real life couples are made from regular chatting. I would guess that the biggest hurdle to hooking up in real life is the distance between people.
When I get in a chat room I find that there are people from Ireland, India, California, all over the world. With so much distance between people, certainly real life hookups are harder to find in a chat room than say a localized social network, but it does happen. I have seen several people pop into chat that are all from the same city, so it can happen.