Theres a google notifyer which when installed sits on the taskbar, and displays how many emails you have, if any, u can then simply double click the icon and it takes you strait to gmail,
Email is a diverse thing, people all use it differently, i myself have 6 email accounts in all, and i use outlook to sync them all with my local machine, i do wish however gmail could retreive the pops, this way i could use gmail as a replacement for outlook, this is good becuase outlook is buggy, and if somethen goes wrong with your pc, you may loose your emails, and have to spend a few mins resetting up outlook, where if gmail could retreive pop, well i could access my email on the go, and if my home pc gets virii or anythen i can format without the concearn of loosing mail because their safe on the gmail servers.