Bing isn't as good as google yet, but its reached the threshold of good enough. Hosted Exchange email is very feature rich. I pay outlook.com 5 per month and get wonderful integration with all my devices for calander, contacts, and ToDo. Gtalk is hard to replace because your friends use it. I use apples messages and it works fine with people on gtalk.

For my core functioms, outlook.com is head and shoulders better. People have probably just gotten used to how utter shit the gmail UI has become, but outlook.com is refreshingly well designed (the web client). And activesync support is of course killer.