[stanleydrew]

Have you considered the cookie implications of every Google product living on a separate domain? We'd have to login so many times.

[benatkin]

Bingo. It's not a bad domain, and I think they'll want to be sure users are logged into other google services when they're using it.

[bmelton]

Gmail.com redirects to mail.google.com, but they own the domain, and I ALWAYS type that in instead of typing mail.google.com.

Picasaweb.com is the same way.

I get your point, and it's not a bad one, generally speaking, but my gmail and picasaweb logins are automatic after I've logged in to any other google service -- I just cleared my entire browser history / passwords / cache etc., to make sure.