Gmail was a way, way, way better experience than Hotmail or anything else when it started (and even almost a decade later). Maps blew everyone's mind at launch too and instantly made an entire group of direction and mapping websites irrelevant. Google Earth was magical just spending hours trotting around the globe too. Reader (RIP) was by far the best RSS reader.

Definitely in the 90s and early 2000s at least, possibly longer. That was part of their thing, being the champion of user experience.

Early Google set themselves apart with the user experience. For example, Google Search's homepage's simplicity was astonishing at the time; a direct inverse of the bloated pages most of their competitors at the time favored (Yahoo, Alta Vista, AOL, and Dogpile were pretty bad if I remember correctly, and Ask Jeeves was somewhere in the middle. The others I don't remember as well). GMail may have not been the best technically speaking (I don't know), but from a user standpoint it was cleaner than the alternatives, who would include things like links to news stories in their inboxes.

I recommended people use Google in part because there was, at the time, less risk of them clicking on something and being confused by it. (Why is there news in my email? Where's my email? How do I search?)