Thanks for sharing. In the case of GMVault, how "important" do you think your email needs to be for you to use something like that, as opposed to using Google's solution when it comes out? Or asked in a different way, what do you feel GMVault could offer which regularly archiving emails using the Google solution can't?
I used GMVault only because Google's solution was not out there at that time. However, as others have mentioned, GMVault works on an incremental basis after the first download, while the Google solution seems to be a snapshot-only service (not 100% sure yet).
By the way, my first download with GMVault (eml format, each email separately gzipped up because I did not read the command line options properly) was : 22900 mails which took up 2 GB of disk space.
You can automate gmvault to snag everything and then just do daily/weekly syncs instead of manually having to remember to go to a website every once in a while and download everything each time.