It's been a while.  I'm still using the old Hotmail design, but dad has been using the newer Live.  It's more AJAX based, but I still prefer GMail's AJAX.  It's part of Microsoft's Live suite (competing with various Google products).
The new Live design absolutely sucks if you have images disabled like I do :P

Nevertheless, GMail supports POP3, SMTP and a swathe of other features (including unofficial GMail drive extensions), thus it absolutely pwns Hotmail right now.  GMail's sPa/\/\ filters are crazy though - not one single piece of sPa/\/\ ever received in my inbox (I did get some sPa/\/\ somehow, after using it for about 2 years, but it got caught by sPa/\/\ filter).