In my daily life there are 10 devices I might use to access email. Instead of spending time to configure IMAP and/or SSH on every device, I just log into Gmail and get shit done the same way in all 10 places.
And there are the devices on which I get shit done.
Mail app on my phone, with filter rules, keeps most of the useful stuff front and center.
It's trivial enough to copy an ~/.offlineimaprc and ~/.muttrc across Linux systems (or Macs FWIW) for everything else.
Sure, if I absolutely need to I can log into Gmail through a web interface on another system. With user/pass auth, that means, though, that I'm extending my security envelope to include whatever exploits that machine may have. Given I've got the Internets in my pocket these days, that's pretty much never necessary.
