This is one of the things that makes me worry about using Google for email. When it works, which is almost all of the time, it works great, but when there are problems, it is difficult to get assistance.
Shouldn't this worry you about ANY email service; even those that you are 100% in control? Backup important data to separate services; have separate services to read this data; do it often, including the read -- make sure your backups work.
Yes, but the specific problem with Google is they have practically zero customer support. There is no one you can call to get help, and they apparently feel no obligation to respond to problems in a timely fashion.
If a 100K people, an insanely huge number, experienced crippling Gmail failure, that is roughly a 0.1% chance that it would affect you on your lifetime. Avoiding Gmail for this is like avoiding planes and cars and houses because you saw on the news that one blew up somewhere.
It's not only email. I got my adwords account banned in a ridiculous manner (got banned out of the blue 18 months after a supposed offense), the email replies were so generic and unhelpful (and obviously not written by a native English speaker), it was really infuriating. Fortunately for Google they can do without my $200 yearly spending on adwords.