Ya know, I can think of one real good thing about Gmail.
It spurred Yahoo! to increase their quality of service. I actually hae a Yahoo! premium email account that I pay for. Yahoo! bumped the mailbox size up to 2gb and threw in some new tools. They'd have probably done something sooner or later, but competition sure incites activity.
I find it to be a lot handier than email service through my ISP because I can freely switch ISPs if a better deal comes along without worrying about having to visit all the **** sites again and give out my new email address.