Actually, not Hotmail, but the paid-for Office 365 mail. Yes, its got a nice clearn interface now. Yes, it can hook into existing Active Directory deployments. Yes its got some nice integration like Outlook calendaring and press-to-say-yes-for-meetings.

But as an email client, it is still miles behind Gmail:

1. If you reply to Person X, and then think of something else to write (before an answer from Person X yet), you can’t just hit ‘reply’ on your latest email Person X – that will only send an email to yourself – you have to track back to the last email he/she sent and then hit ‘reply’. Good luck including the email you just sent, because …
2. Cut-and-paste is awkward to use (on Firefox at least). Pasting usually brings in styles that you can’t easily remove, and for some reason, it makes the text-edit screen jump lines (although the text is pasted where it should be, its still disorienting).
3. Contact management is a pain. Good luck just wanting a copy of someone’s email – the AJAX or whatever technology they use to make each contact a pop-up-able thing won’t let you copy the email!
4. Office 365 mail will only accept one type of delinator when pasting a string of email addresses. Yes, we should know better, but is it that difficult to detect more than 1 delinator? Comma, semi-colon, and space please!