The deficiencies in the goog interfaces, across multiple products, are legion. I recall someone talking about it recently compared to Palm Pilot, and how the latter could do detail obscuring when just wanting to share a single piece of information on a screen (think the examples used were calendar and contact)

The other “fun” thing is how they kill off features/things to force people into how they want a thing to be used. And I believe IMAP with normal credential auth is one of those on the list for later this year… 😡