My wife's old yahoo account got hacked. Watching yahoo's nonexistent "customer service" "help" her convinced me there is a giant hidden danger to webmail--she essentially had no recourse, no way to reclaim the address, no way to recover old emails, no way to stop this person from getting new emails she might receive, and no way to stop them from impersonating her.
For geeks (and perhaps geek's spouses) owning your own domain and only contracting out the email hosting to Google is probably the way to go here. If it all goes wrong then you control the domain and what happens to emails sent to it.
