Not sure if I'll end up using it as my email address, but dlnorman@gmail.com went live today. At first blush, it looks pretty cool. I'd love to be able to connect via IMAP, but that would probably kill the whole adsense interface that pays for the whole thing...
I know of 2 ways to get a GMail account:
I'm cheap, so you can guess which one I used. Only active Blogger accounts are added to the GMail beta. Active is a somewhat arbitrary term, since you only need to have 2 posts in a weblog, with one posted sometime in the last 2 weeks. They can even be something creative like "Testing." I'm just saying...