Lets hope that next feature of google labs will be the ability to turn it on in Google Apps

It is available; can be turned on from Settigns | Labs.

Not in Google Apps. I tried, and I don't have the "labs" link. I can enable it for my regular gmail account though.

You may have to have your Google Apps configured to turn on new features in Domain Settings. It's definitely working for me.

Is it just me, or does GMail seem to have become a bit of a low-priority backwater in Google's grand design? There's a difference between simplicity and abandonware, and they're nudging it.

It must be just you, because they've kept adding things that I've found immensely useful like imap and pop checking for other nongmail-accounts. I think they do a lot behind the scenes to make it great.

Gmail also works great. At some point a design reaches a limit as to how much better it can be.

> At some point a design reaches a limit as to how much better it can be.

I assume this is true as well but there's no reason to suspect Gmail is anywhere near as good as it could potentially be.

That's a really interesting feature, implemented without UI suckitude. Always nice to see...

Now lets see being able to manually set your status as "away" in gmail chat. PLEASE.