I could not agree more with you that Github should have acquired a CI tool and worked on PaaS. Big missed opportunity for them and for their customers. I do expect Azure to become well supported on Github at some point, but Github had the opportunity to build something truly awesome and cloud vendor neutral. Very sad and weird they sold out, but it is theoretically possible Microsoft will do a better job moving Github forward.

Gitlab seems fine but it's just not as smooth / good looking as Github. Github is one of the best websites ever made in my opinion. I do like the fact Gitlab is more aggressive in adding CI features. Maybe I'll check them out...