[WA]

I use Mail on OS X and it is good enough for my purpose. Could certainly be a bit more sophisticated, but most of the time, it works. I like to have a real email client for my mails and not use a web app.

There might be dedicated search engines for emails though, if search is very important.

See, if you use search a lot and Google has the superior product for your use case, that's totally fine. But I guess most people use Gmail out of habit and not because it is truly superior to other email clients.

[Albright]

I'm with you here - I also find OS X's Mail plenty "good enough," including for search. And it works great for connecting to Google Mail accounts via IMAP…