Agreed. Do we really want Gmail to be a great operating system lacking only a decent mail client? What is this, emacs 2.0?
And so what if people are using it differently then how it was originally intended? Give me a well designed tool, and I'll use it in 930294 ways it wasn't indented to be. That doesn't mean I'm going to like the new super-multi-purpose swiss army knife version of that tool.... Keep it simple stoopid, get off my lawn, not in my back yard, go unix, etc etc </curmudgeony old person rant>