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This goes in hand with your Sabermetric Fatigue posts. It's literary elitism. And chatspeak is counterintuitive and unacceptable in the PhD review room.
Now, I don't encourage chatspeak. In fact, I'm a twitter user and I make it a point NOT to use chatspeak because it reduces the challenge of being elloquent in 140 charaters. Like Shakespeare said, brevity is the soul of wit.
But linguists, from what I have heard, accept the fact that chatspeak and its brethren are part of the evolving English lexicon. Much like the recent Oxford English Word 'unfriend', which is a complete bastardization of the English language per se, English experts accept that chatspeak is a natural evolution of the language.
Chatspeak is nothing harmful. It's the users of English adapting to typing with just thumbs.
(Somewhat off topic, but LL's two rules of no politics and no chatspeak are, for me, overly intolerant. I couldn't even comment on the fact that Barack Obama was making the first pitch at the All Star Game. The 'spirit' of the rule is to keep out political bickering, yet I was still smited with the rule on the comment that Barack Obama, our president, was throwing the first pitch. I have yet to return.)