They say stuff like “Gmail’s blown away” and “Much superior to Gmail” but the only thing I see is that they’ve turned the usual web-based mail experience to the usual desktop experience. Find screenshots of Yahoo Mail beta and Hotmail Beta and it looks just like Outlook.
Now I agree that the message preview pane is very helpful but Gmail’s conversation view and tag system for archiving mails is very very useful. Why not incorporate those too? Web2.0 apps almost all seem to be using tag system simply because it’s way more powerful and usable than the folder hierarchy system.
Just for the record, I find Yahoo’s tab system very good too. I’ll just have to wait to see how it actually works. I’ve only seen screenshots as of yet.