In reply to:
I haven't been paying attention... the main benifit is jsut that gig of space, right?...
That's just part of it. The main benefit is the storage combined with the ability to do a google search on your stored messages.
After Google announced gmail, everyone was going crazy about the gigabyte of storage. So a bunch of other e-mail services upped their storage to compete. But it's not really very enticing competition without the addition of the google search feature, because the whole point of having a gig of storage and not ever having to delete a message is so you can just search through all of your old messages when you're looking for something someone sent you. It's really amazingly convenient.
Oh, and the web interface is far an away the best webmail interface I've ever encountered.
