I don't think the parent post was arguing about that, I think he was arguing that if these are important features to you, why choose gmail in the first place?
Upsides: it's ubiquitous, well-provisioned, has very high uptimes (a few outages, those tend to become national or international news), and, for now, good support of IMPAPS or POPS access for standalone email clients (which I use on my phone and desktop).
Downsides: Snooping, NSA honeypot, Chinese government hacker honeypot, etc., etc.
