The meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. It is embedded into the html so you wouldn't be able to tell a site which uses meta tags apart from one that doesn't. But there's much dispute over whether search engines recognise them at all. The truth is that good content is more likely to help you with your search engine visibility than fancy tags.
A meta tag looks something like this:
meta name="description" content="a description of your page" OR
meta name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords"
and it does not need a closing tag. The use of the tag has in the past resulted in some web site owners abusing it in the hope of tricking the search engines into driving traffic to their site. However, that was about 10 years ago and since then search engines have become a lot more sophisticated in their crawling mechanisms.
It is true that, for certain search engines, you may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how your site is indexed by the use of the meta tag. Correct meta tags won't help you in optimizing for Google, but misleading meta tags could cause your site to be penalized.
From reading other peoples opinions, it seems that although meta tags are not given much importance by search engines, title tags and meta description tags are still considered to be very effective tools for increasing clickthrough rate. It appears as though no-one's really certain about meta tags but generally people are still of the opinion that, providing the content and keywords are relevant, it is still worth doing. In short, meta tags aren't quite dead yet.
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