Actually the downtime is still much below the typical downtime you get from most other providers. It shouldn't happen, but Google's record so far with GMail is far above what others offer. Granted, the problem is bigger when many users are affected at once, but weighing what's more important, average higher uptime or more frequent downtime affecting only you and a few others, is pretty difficult, Mail after all is nothing you'd typically want to do yourself for the exact same reason: Sure you can run a mail server at home... it's very, very easy! But you usually have more downtime because you can't afford fallbacks.

You missed the point here.... Gmail isn't a simply mail server, it's a "web mail" that became an "off-line" mail client (well, sort of...) not so long ago, and it is one of those things from which this meme called "cloud computing" should begin to conquer the users' PC. Bullshits, aaaall bullshits!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/24/doubleclick_distributes_malware/
This story is becoming pathetic, now... And I should store my data (mp3 files, a P2P Blu-ray rip matroskai file, a text file, anything) in this sort of nasty thing called "The Internet Cloud"? Oh, c'mon, be serious that I'm not laughing at all....
P.S.Sorry for the grammatical shitware I made, but at the moment I have an horse-alike fever I have no courage to measure XD

How is that missing the point? GMail is a service that people use because it's more comfortable than setting it up yourself. It's a prime example where software as a service makes sense... maintaining it yourself is a bitch, so you hand it off to a provider that can do a better job. Simple as that. Yes, it fails from time to time, but if you did it yourself downtime would be even worse AND you'd have to spend time and resources on it. I'm using GMail, eventhough I have a ready to run server myself which is running 24/7. I just don't care enough about it to maintain it myself. Whenever the cost and effort for setting it up myself is higher than what a service provider asks for, I use a service provider.
And what have virus infected ads to do with it?

Cloud computing other than e-mail services or voluntary online storage will probable never come to pass, considering the global state of the Internet. It's not stable enough, it's not developed enough, and it isn't widely enough distributed. Even local weather and nature phenomenas makes it unstable enough. And then we have politics, people, countries and relations between them. Something like this would probably under constant surveillance, nothing being truly private.
The way some things have been developing lately, with less online privacy and ruling parties trying to get as much control over the web as possible, we're closing in a society slightly reminiscent of what is well described in the book 1984. Australia seems to already be half-way there with all the shit going on there, where the government seems to be trying to babysit for the population.
But I digress. It's not a viable option for me, and certainly not a desirable option. I like to have all the data that can be, stored locally. E-mail is so-so, since I usually have more need in receiving new e-mails, than storing the ones I already got.

I think the point that KingofGnG is trying to make is professionals can't trust an online service to maintain their data or run business critical applications like e-mail when it can simply go offline like that. Consider this: if cloud computing becomes the standard and everyone switches to internet mail like G-Mail and it goes offline, then multiple businesses cannot function. At least with an in-house e-mail server, when it goes down, only that one business is affected, not dozens of businesses across multiple countries. For personal uses, internet mail services like G-Mail are fine, but for professional uses, it's just too risky.
I believe the point of the ad virus story is just another example of what can and most likely will go wrong with cloud computing. Right now, getting a virus infection usually requires some type of manual action on the part of a clueless user (such as opening an infected e-mail attachment), while the more educated user is smart enough to not take that action (or use antivirus). With these malicious scripts, even that educated user is vulnerable, since all they have to do is visit an otherwise trusted page and the malware runs itself. The potential for a malware pandemic is huge.

The problem I'm seeing with this: most people assume that business networks are run by people who "know stuff", but the shocking truth is that most small to mid sized businesses are usually not managed very well. If you're lucky, they've set up the computers to automatically install updates, but more often than not their not, because they think that their firewall is a magic shield that keeps everything bad out.
I'm not saying that everything should be moved over to the cloud, there are lots of cases where it doesn't make sense, but there are also many where it does.
Saying "cloud computing can never work" or "cloud computing is the best" is just too black and white.