Shit happens with every provider, free or paid; hoping it won't because you pay $400/month for it is foolish. The smart thing is to make sure it doesn't affect you much, by decoupling from the service and turning it into a replaceable commodity as much as possible. That means using your own domain, keeping backups, etc. Then, when shit happens, you can just sign up for another provider and keep going.
Shit happens, but with nearly every other provider, you can at least talk to someone to find out what happened and get your service restored, or at least get your data.
You can always get your data if you do backups - like you should in any case - so that point is moot.
So, you're paying and giving up on a nice webmail client with two-factor auth (how many providers offer this?) for "finding out what happen". I don't think it's a great deal.
I'm not a Gmail apologist, by the way - I think there are valid reasons not to use it, like not giving Google a copy of your whole life - but I don't find their policy for when "shit happens" a real problem.
You do not have to give GMail up, not sure where you read that...
The point was, that exclusively relying on it is not smart, if email is important to you. You can easily use the full benefits of your gmail convenience while still having a fully working fallback. There are even two ways of doing it, one would be to simply forward your email, or using your own domain on google apps.
