The Google Docs vs Excel is pretty scathing: the user can't open the document from GMail, and even simple stuff like charts are removed from the spreadsheet.

Google do search and maps really well, but Google apps. including GMail, still aren't very popular (Yahoo mail is apparently huge). They're an engineering company, they still don't get user experience. There's still no preview window in gmail, documents are shown with very long lines of text that are difficult to read when compared with the common newspaper-column layout. Google need to start hiring UI people yesterday if they want to compete with MS in the office space.