Google is moving to one account for all of Google, like it should have been in the first place. Of course deleting your YouTube account would delete everything else.
It's certainly not a great solution, but I practice 'clean room' browsing, by using one browser where I log in to services like GMail, and one browser for anonymous stuff.
What happened to "Don't be evil?" I turned that off but the problem is you're never sure if you've actually handled something correctly because they make it so darn difficult.
