My very-much-not-a-lawyer understanding is that their legal obligations and liabilities are minimal on account of Gmail being offered free of charge. Anyone know if that's true?

Not true.

Say I offer my front yard for anyone to use for free.

You come and set up a bbq stand to have a picnic with your friends. You walk across the street to a lemonade stand, and when you return, you're confronted with a security guard who won't let you back into my yard.

You demand entry, saying your property is in my yard. You want to speak with me, but the security guard says you can't do that. What you can do is head over to the town square and ask if anyone there knows how you can regain access to your property.

> This account "owns" digital goods, thousands of songs, and many domain names.

It seems it's not only about a free Gmail account.

Google incentivizes and encourages users to entrust and entangle important, and often financial, aspects of their lives with Google's services, and in exchange, Google gets to profit greatly by mining their data. They also charge users money for many of their services, too.

Its the terms of service users agreed to. Prices not relevant

That doesn't sound right. If you charge money, you have to deliver a product that's fit for service. You can't take people's money then refuse to deliver.

At least here in the UK, EULAs that say You have no recourse if we completely fail to deliver are generally disregarded in court, as it should be.

But this scenario is neither a refusal or complete failure (debatable). But again, the terms of service are more important than the price factor.

The big G say they can kick you off whenever/wherever.

That it's free in price is just another way to give the "customer" (really just user) less power.