Why put ladders ingame, when you can have them on a website for all the world to see and which the community itself can develop and maintain, cooperating with the community to build the game that we all want.
This is a great move by Relic! 
because leaderboard is a party of the game and why you would have to open your browser to get your stat ? Do you think eveyrone know coh2.org ? I guess it will cost around nothing for relic (compare to implement système).
So i guess, we will never get implement lobby system like we had on coh 1 to get some SOCIAL stuff.