[icebraining]

being kicked off it kills the rest of your Google accounts

Where did you saw that? According to Horowitz (one of their VPs), it doesn't:

    When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name 
    standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+
    profile are not removed,

[hga]

This would seem to be a change in policy, and "violating the Google+ common name standards" (which I would not have intended to do or likely have accidentally done) is certainly not the only way to get kicked off of it.

The more Google intertwingles their services the more cascading policy "failures" can put you in a world of hurt. Hence my one company, one service policy. In the case of Google (ignoring membership in some Google Groups, but to a non-Google address) it's Google Docs. (I'm not counting the non-sticky ones like search and Maps.)