Looks like we are getting closer to the general release of GMail. I am on the signup list mentioned by akaDruid below but I have not received an invite as of yet…

Just thought you might be interested, for your blog.  Gmail has gone semi-public by emailing invites to the mailing list they had on the front page for a long time.  You can’t sign up to it anymore (not that I can see anyway) but it used to say something along the lines of ‘enter your email address to be told about updates to Gmail’.

More Info: akaDruid’s text dump of the invitation from Google