I’ve just noticed Gmail now has a save as draft option. It’s appeared in the last couple of hours. It was def­in­itely some­thing I was wait­ing for. It’s another step in the right dir­ec­tion.
Other new stuff: the con­tacts have moved into the main browser win­dow rather than being a popup. They now appear more like the mail folder inter­face, though the divi­sion is purely ‘fre­quently mailed’ or all con­tacts, I think that is too crude to be use­ful, I pref­ered the alpha­betic links. There is a search which looks in the notes as well as name and email.
Another change is that the “Invite x friends to Gmail” link has dis­ap­peared back below the fold (or at least it is if you have a lot of labels). Which I think is a step backwards.

Update: The con­tact info can now include a good assort­ment of extra info like tele­phone num­bers, addresses, IM, copany, etc. And in mul­t­piple ‘sets’ like home, work, etc. Groovy. I won­der if import con­tacts will pop­u­late those new fields if they are present in the import…

Another Update:You can now do for­ward­ing! Under set­tings you can “For­ward a copy of incom­ing mail to [email­ad­dress]” and option­ally put a copy in your gmail inbox, archive or trash. And you can do it in a filter.