I hate Gmail, at first I was neutral on it, then I went to work for Google and got to see it used "in production" as it were and found how it could be really useful, then stuff I liked (layout, features) got changed and/or deleted and I now I don't like it.
Now there is nothing wrong per se with Gmail, its doing its thing and I'm doing mine, but I cannot step off the train. I can't just not buy the upgrade and stay with the feature set I like, the train keeps moving, I get sucked along with it. We pay for Gmail for our company, as a paying customer the majority of our users wanted to stay with the old format, we could not. Not an option. I supposed that it true of IT shops that are built on top of Notes or Exchange as well, you get what you get.
I stopped using Gmail labs features when I realized that if they don't "graduate" they vanish. And if you've grown to depend on them, you're screwed.
Sigh.