I agree with a lot of what you're saying, except I wanted to point out that I still greatly prefer native email clients (I'm 24, for what it's worth). Outlook is actually a very competent piece of software on OS X and I use it at work; it's easily on par with Mail.app for me. I prefer either of these to any web email interface I've used, as they are considerably more responsive (even Gmail seems laggy in comparison).