Is Google doing away with use of the meta description?

Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, answers questions from users.

Quentin from Vancouver asks:

"In the search results, Google will often display a snippet appropriate to the specific search query - often disregarding the meta description. Is Google doing away with meta description use like they did with meta keywords?"

Matt Cutts Discusses Snippets

Matt Cutts, Google software engineer, discusses how best to optimize your site for Google. 
Matt Cutts joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000. He is currently the head of Google's Webspam team