I believe that the <title> tag is a mandatory element for a XHTML document (possibly also HTML). I wouldn't class it as a meta tag because it is actually part of the page and is displayed by the browser. However it is often used as metadata, you'll notice that google takes the page title as the name for a search result.
The <meta name="title" ...> tag is a meta tag containing the page title, these <meta> tags are never displayed (but are visible in the page source). Many meta tags can be defined that describe things such as the page author, date, keywords, contents etc. However there are no defined rules stating how these tags are used so it is nearly impossible to predict if they will be read. People may still include them though because it doesn't do any harm if there is something looking for them. Back in the early days search engines used these as the basis for determining the page content, however the flaw in this was quickly realised as there is no rules saying that they contents of the tags must match the actual content on the page (this was one of the ways search engine optimization was done at the time). This is why all modern search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and others read the actual page to determine the contents rather than relying on the meta tags. Thats not to say that they are obsolete, there are specific tags that are still read by search engines such as <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> to control what the search engine is allowed to do with the page.
