I set up Wanderlust, and by god it sorta worked with Gmail. Sorta. There were little problems with messages getting resurrected as "unread" even after I'd read them, and composing a message meant my "drafts" folder got pounded by incremental saved messages every 30 seconds, but whatever.
Then I tried to find a web browser that runs in Emacs and will display pages properly, not in the broken Links/Lynx way (with or without pictures). No dice. Oh well.
Then I started using IRC and my IM clients in Emacs. They worked ok, but it was around this point that I started to realize what an incredible pain in the ass it is to manage buffers in Emacs.
To start with, you never really have enough space on screen, so a lot of the buffers end up being hidden. Ok, whatever, but then you realize it's a hassle to even switch over to a different buffer, with the M-x b type-some-of-the-buffer-name dance, since you can't keep them all on-screen to switch around with C-x o. Of course, C-x o begins to get cumbersome when I have more than a couple windows/buffers open on screen at a time.
Then I realized that I'd really rather make my fingers feel happier (and yes, I use the swapped Caps Lock key) and just use this amazing tool we already have. It's designed for selecting things, and it moves spatially in 2 dimensions. I guess I don't look so haxxor-1337 anymore, waving that mouse around like a clueless Windows user, but I'm actually happy now that I left the Cult of the Key-Combo.
These days, I read my email in Firefox because I just don't care, and I do all my coding and text-editing in Acme, because I do care. For all the bullshit Emacsians spew about "losing focus by switching applications", they're switching applications at least as much as I do, every single time they M-x wanderlust, or switch over to the Org buffer--they're just switching applications with M-x b, rather than Alt-Tab.