Depends on how one classifies the chatterbox I suppose. As it is now it's more of a social tool where people occasionally do pop in a serious question, which may or may not get answered straight away. Most of the questions tend to end up in SoPW, which is a far better place imo anyway.

As for actually using IRC, as can clearly be seen in my posting history I'm a great fan of this medium and spend a lot of time combining it with Perl and as such I'd positively love to have a place on IRC to hang out with other Monasterians, but whether it'd turn out to be a good place to ask questions is another matter. The only real reasons I can think of for someone to ask a question in CB as opposed to SoPW is because a) a fellow monk that person knows is already chatting there and is aware of the situation/known to be very knowledgeable on the matter, or b) the person asking the question is horribly impatient.
Situation b) is a serious case of "tough luck", either someone knows or noone does. As for situation a) I still think It'd be better to create a post on SoPW and then pm said expert/friend asking him/her to take a quick look at the node created, if only for the fact that that way the information might be preserved, allowing others to find the same answer later on.