I have made a conscious effort to avoid Google products as much as I could for some time, part social experiment, but also because I could use Bing without having to use a VPN while living in China.

My personal results are that you can totally ditch Google Search, Gmail, etc, and no, Google stuff is not orders of magnitude better. Nowadays, living outside the GFW again, I switch freely between Bing and DuckDuckGo, but it will always be a pain in the ass not having access to Youtube. That, imho, is Google's killer product.

And then you have things like Yandex which is a tad better than Google in Russia and Baidu which does the same in China (compared to Google HK)