The problem is...
"I can't for the life of me understand why anyone other than a massochist would want to use the hotmail UI to access their gmail account"
Google have a tendency to decide what's best for you, no matter how strongly you disagree.
For instance, the ability to disable Google's annoying "conversations" and sort your email by date, sender or subject is always near the top of the list of requested features for gmail, and it wold be a piece of cake to implement.
Various conspiracy theories exist as to why Google keep refusing to add this feature, but the bottom line is that they just won't do it willingly. It was only under intense pressure from users that Google eventually added the ability to delete email, so it seems plausible that Google just want to hoard information, because that's the business they're in after all, and the ability to sort your inbox would allow you to quickly delete unwanted messages.
It's the one and only reason I stopped using my gmail account. The account is still there, and I check in every now and then, but only to be scared off by thousands of messages arranged in "conversations" by some mechanism I can't understand or predict. It would take hours to sort out. In Hotmail or Outlook or any other client I could do it in minutes.
Hotmail by contrast looks like I expect an email client to look. Maybe I'm just being thick and Google's way is actually somehow better, but I don't see it. I continue to believe that software should serve the user first, and the developer's ego dead-last. If I could take the email address with me to ANY other webmail provider I would, in a heartbeat.
So the ability to keep my gmail address while using a proper email client is very interesting.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
