I don't think the parent post was arguing about that, I think he was arguing that if these are important features to you, why choose gmail in the first place?

Upsides: it's ubiquitous, well-provisioned, has very high uptimes (a few outages, those tend to become national or international news), and, for now, good support of IMPAPS or POPS access for standalone email clients (which I use on my phone and desktop).

Downsides: Snooping, NSA honeypot, Chinese government hacker honeypot, etc., etc.

Because you already have a Gmail account when you decide to care about these issues?

Maybe I did not choose it? Maybe my employer did?

I wouldnt disagree with anything but the GPG, a dishearteningly small number of users use such features.

Moreover, if you regularly use GPG, the GMail web interface would be nearly unusable, no? So it seems you'd be much better off with nearly any other email provider.

Most GPG messages I get are signed, not encrypted, and I usually don't need to check the signature. So the web client is fine, but it's still good to have desktop client access.

Why are other email providers better than (Gmail - web interface)?

there are some browser extensions for that