what's useful about a folder concept is that you could have a whole folder full of certain emails just locked away from your main view. you can filter them out of your main inbox. is something like that available in gmail? can you remove certain labeled emails from view?

>can you remove certain labeled emails from view?

Make a filter to automatically label certain e-mails and check the "Skip Inbox" box to automatically archive them. Or just click on the label, select "All", and hit the "Archive" button to remove from the Inbox.

Exactly. You can just consider "inbox" to be a special label and "archive" to be the way to remove that label. I archive everything after a certian amount of time to keep my inbox clean.