Wow, no reply yet points out that this is part of the whole effort to undermine one of our few open standards (email) and eventually turn everything into siloed walled-garden platforms.

Once Google Inbox is used widely, people will find it that much harder to use other e-mail systems.

I can't seem to find it now, but I read a wonderful article about how Facebook messaging and all sorts of other silos are about these platforms controlling everything and Google wishes they could have that same sort of control and push everything into their own proprietary messaging, although this fragmentation is obviously destructive for the internet and society overall.