The ability to access my email from anywhere, organize, and quickly search through thousands and thousands of emails in seconds has improved my quality of life. Maybe not as much as indoor plumbing, but it has.
http://www.quantcast.com/profile/trafficGraph?wunit=wd%3Acom...
http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/gmailvs-hotm...
Of course, since you are only a college freshman, I don't blame you for not knowing that there were dozens of serviceable webmail clients long before the existence of gmail.
He thinks that Google invented or revolutionized webmail, maps, etc... when it is clear to anyone who's been on the internet for more than 8 years that they were only incremental updates.
Before Google sold gmail to colleges, my college and many others used squirrelmail and pine which was more than adequate. Any sizable college that had an IT department that could support email anyway.