From the perspective of someone who receives tons of spam, I find it's a good thing.

From the perspective of someone who had to do a lot of administrative work by hand to increase reputation of ips because of some guy had his email hacked to send lot of spam, I find it's a good thing.

From the perspective of someone who uses the free SMTP service of Google to send emails from a not gmail domain where there is no SMTP, well it's uncomfortable. There are solutions, paid solutions, but still.

Is it really a responsibility of Google to provide a qualitative free SMTP service for other domain names ? I don't think so.