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As web-based email clients go, I really do like Gmail moreso than anything else, and if I were living entirely in a web-based world, I'd probably have stayed with it — I really do like the web interface a lot, and it's fast and really intuitive once you get used to it, especially with keyboard shortcuts, labels, and search, and what Google's doing with its new Inbox service is even more interesting, with built-in snooze features, the ability to ferret out email as rich content items (orders, receipts, reservations show appropriate cards above the email, summarizing the data in a standard format). Privacy issues aside, which are largely subjective, I think it's a very nice solution if you live on the web.
I actually still have a Google Apps account (so privacy issues aren't even an issue for me), and I use it for certain things (Google Drive, where I have unlimited cloud storage, for instance), but I use FastMail for my email.
The main reason is that Gmail doesn't really have IMAP support. At least, not if you consider IMAP to be an actual "standard" rather than a casual communications protocol. Gmail's IMAP support has always ranged from weird to outright broken, but due to the popularity of Gmail companies like Apple have actually taken steps to write their email clients specifically to play nice with it.
At the end of the day, however, even when everything works, I just don't see the point in using Gmail unless I'm using the web interface. If I'm using an IMAP client (which I primarily do, as I'm a Mac, iPhone, iPad, I use Apple Mail across all of my devices), it's far better and easier to use a service like FastMail that talks pure and unadulterated IMAP, where I'm not mapping labels to folders or dealing with other weird issues. I also get much more effective offline access to my email when I'm away from an Internet connection, tighter integration with other apps, and more options for customization through plug-ins and Applescripts.
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