I think the previous analogy from Andreas; "why do we still bother with these useless ramps infront of public libraries?", completely misses the point. If GMail WAS a library website (being deliberately close to the original comparison here but fill in your own; news site, govt site, whatever) then of course we'd expect it to be accessible. GMail is a web application and is using technologies (like XMLHTTPRequest) which are themselves pushing the capabilities of current browsers.
Web applications already struggle within the constraints of browsers and depending on their use often need to be doing so. This is one area I feel where the general referral to "web standards" begins to get on to loose ground. If I handed out a magazine and asked it to be semantically marked up, It would involve some discussion but would certainly be doable, but what if I handed out an email client? I know it would be a lot harder and that's just the semantics.
I think this really is a case of needing to cut them some slack, as what they are doing is a bit like the Haute Couture of web development and you would expect it to filter down in time.
I think I'd be following Chris' point with what most web developers/programmers have been doing which is asking "why are Google HAVING to do it like that?". I know for sure in the application development I do, I wish there were easier ways.
Nick
possibly a more interesting question to be asking is exactly what 'standard' should gmail be following?
WCAG doesn't seem appropriate to me, as this is certainly more an application than a web page
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