Ross Rader had a great insight into the real problem with GMail, the newest e-mail portal in the Net, to be soon introduced by the folks from Google.  In a recent post in his Random Bytes blog, Ross points out the following:

GMail is an email client. Google is a server company.
Hotmail is an email client. Microsoft is a client company.

Email is a client business.

But functionality, while a key criterion, is not the sole piece of the overall puzzle.  Some people might object to the fact that Google will scan the messages so that it can present targeted advertising.  But, arguably, any unencrypted e-mail message passing through several Internet mail hops could theoretically be scanned as well.  This scanning can be fully automated (like Google) or conceivably done with human intervention if some conditions are met.  David Akin mentioned in a recent article that NSA officers in locations such as Fort Meade count on a variety of tools to monitor millions of daily e-mail and phone chats every day, searching for certain traffic patterns or keywords.

Another key issue is that most people would prefer having the storage of the messages being done right at their hard drives instead of on the network.  1GB worth of space might be great vis-a-vis Yahoo! or Hotmail, but the fact that those messages do not physically reside at the hard drives of the users' computers could ultimately end up curtailing the uptake of GMail - many users would prefer relying upon an e-mail client such as Outlook for their own machines, and their own ISP portal for when they are away from home. 

Undoubtedly, some users will take advantage of GMail to save messages with large attachments.  However, also look for Yahoo! and Hotmail to raise their respective message storage limits.