Diablo III will have its own unique needs in terms of what Battle.Net provides
Pearce also revealed that the team working on the new Battle.Net is a separate division within Blizzard.
The Battle.Net team is actually a separate group of engineers working on that functionality,” he added. “So, they’re working with the StarCraft II team and they’ll be working pretty integrally with the Diablo III team as well.
Source: VG247
The friends list was always annoying anyways because you have to type commands to see who's on and where, and then it just dumps a lot of text on your screen... very annoying, especially when you're in-game.