wanted gmail enhancements

I just finished moving all my mail from IMAP mac.com account to gmail during the last couple of days (with help of a very useful Python script). I have become rather tired of using mac.com, especially considering their terrible webmail interface and the fact that they are just not getting up to speed with the online offerings. When a paid service can only give you 1GB of storage, and a free version gives you 3GB you know there is something out of whack.

Anyway, Mac.com offers a lot of goodies by tying Mac OS X up to the web, but I have come to realize that I use very very little of it. The verdict is still out if I will keep my subscription this fall or not... That said, I have also found several shortcomings with the gmail solution, of some I'll try to list here:

Improve Contacts! - It is seriously lacking right now. Give me the option of merging several contacts into one, importing more complex files than .csv (what about vCards?)

IMAP connection - Yeah, I know it might be challenge considering that gmail does not store in a traditional folder structure, but why not make the labels appear as folders in the IMAP version?

Paid, commercial-free solution - I would be happy to pay a couple of bucks a year to avoid seeing the ads, and additionally knowing that no-one reads my emails (although I know it's just a algorithmic parsing)

Build Growl support into the Gmail Notifier Mac version

Some way of synchronizing Contacts on your computer (either Mac OS X Addressbook or Outlook Contacts) and the gmail Contacts list. I have been considering writing a Mac app for this myself, we'll see if I have time...

To-do's - Starring emails is good, but sometimes you only need a line or two from an email and just want to store that as a to-do. Make To-do a link right under "Starred".

Add Chat support in Safari(!)

Integrate with Notebook

Ok, let's see how many of these will be implemented a year from now :)