They would have to make sure not to put ads / branding in your email sig. That would be as tasteless as: ----------- Do you Yahoo? ----------- At the end of every message.
You get what you pay for, although some may have purchased their gmail accounts, but the vast majority will get their accounts for free. Nonetheless, I don't really care much about the POP3 access. I used to use Outlook all the time for my main mail with comcast. My main problem with that was when I formatted my box, or needed an email from a remote location, I could never get to it because it was downloaded to my outlook account on a different machine, or I had forgotten to backup my outlook emails (most of the time I remembered to do this, but other times I didn't). POP3 also gives little reason for having 1 GB of space. The only good thing about the service is the 10 MB attachment if you're using pop3. I love my gmail, but probably won't be using pop3 if it becomes available.