None of this is news. People complain about Google's lack of support all the time; it is a well known issue.

Also, complaining about having to use POP or IMAP to pull out your email? Seriously? It's a standard, it lets you import them into any email program you want, and just giving you a compressed archive of everything would be a nightmare of compatibility if you wanted to do anything with it but read the messages in a text editor.