If you're questioning the grandparent's notion that Gmail is "crappy" compared to expensive email products, I'd agree with you.
For me, the answer to what justifies a cost for email is deliverability. Of course, having recipients receive your email promptly, and receiving theirs promptly. But more importantly, receiving next to zero spam in my actual inbox, and misclassifying absolutely zero ham in my spam folder.
The only solution I've found that accomplishes this at any price is GMail / Google Apps.
Not only does it easily keep 12 - 18 year old email addresses that have been on usenet spam free, it happily handled over 3000 spam per second per box while letting through valid emails for sex.com. The owners could actually use their addresses on Google Apps. They hadn't been able to on email systems costing 4 and even 5 figures. Refreshing the spam label while seeing the inbox stay empty, day after day and month after month, was astonishing.
Gmail does better than most alternatives for antispam. It's pretty good for deliverability (although it's actually kind of bad for receiving mail from semi-sketchy places; it doesn't even go into my spam box).
It's a slow UI (I often see 20-30 second page loading times on a fast network, over SSL), the support on the free tier is horrible (i.e. non-existent), the $50/user/yr support is below what I'd want for a company to rely on it (it's ok as second or third tier support for your in-house people, I guess, but not great frontline support for non-technical users when traveling).
The real killer, though, is lack of the enhanced features Exchange offers for directory, scheduling, etc. I always hated people who depended on those kind of things, but once I started using them, it made life annoying to not have them. Google Calendar and Google Contacts are feature-incomplete and often buggy (syncing to devices, other than maybe Android phones), especially when you have multiple calendars, sharing, etc.
It's all fine for individual users, but for a group of 5-25+ people (startup, pe fund, etc.), using google apps often sucks.
For me, the answer to what justifies a cost for email is deliverability. Of course, having recipients receive your email promptly, and receiving theirs promptly. But more importantly, receiving next to zero spam in my actual inbox, and misclassifying absolutely zero ham in my spam folder.
The only solution I've found that accomplishes this at any price is GMail / Google Apps.
Not only does it easily keep 12 - 18 year old email addresses that have been on usenet spam free, it happily handled over 3000 spam per second per box while letting through valid emails for sex.com. The owners could actually use their addresses on Google Apps. They hadn't been able to on email systems costing 4 and even 5 figures. Refreshing the spam label while seeing the inbox stay empty, day after day and month after month, was astonishing.