So if I've got rid of that (generally I have fewer than half a dozen e-mails in my inbox so tabs were pretty pointless for me) where do they appear? My assumption was in the regular inbox.
Those are clearly "special" emails, so I don't think it can be safely assumed they would be processed the same way as normal emails - it would have to be tested.
Personally, I think Google added the Promotions tab exactly because they knew they would get a major backlash against putting ads in the normal inbox.
Interesting. That could mean that this is a stop-gap before ads appear in the main inbox for users who don't use tabs. I expect that would take years though as people would need to be conditioned to the current system first. In any case it feels like a slightly underhanded way to 'subscribe' you to 'mail' you didn't ask for.
I use Gmail over IMAP so no of the web UI stuff they've done has affected me at all (in aggregate, I feel that's worked in my favour).
What's a good email provider? I have tens of domains I want to consolidate into a single inbox (and maybe send valid mail from), and Google Apps hasn't been doing a great job with that until now.
ZoHo might be able to do that for you, but I'm not sure -- they might separate it at the domain level. But I'd think mail forwarding for 10 inboxes shouldn't be a stretch for them.
If that's the case then it could be time to start looking for a replacement for the last Google product I use.