What I don't like is that Premier Edition accounts still display the vertical sidebar on the right side of the message view screen (which on free accounts is mostly taken up by the text ads). It's true that Premier accounts can choose to disable ads, BUT they cannot remove the sidebar altogether in order to reclaim more space for the actual message content. So Premier accounts end up with a mostly blank (and mostly useless) sidebar space. Whereas Yahoo Mail Plus and Hotmail Plus paid accounts get rid of the right-hand sidebar space (used for ads) altogether.
It's true that in Gmail/Google Apps, the top of the sidebar also contains useful
links other than the ads (to open a new window, to print, to expand messages in a thread, etc, and depending on message content, even links to display maps, delivery tracking, and calendar event creation). But for the most part these links take up little space and would have been better placed elsewhere, such as across the top of the message. That way the sidebar can be removed altogether on Premier accounts.
On your own computer, there are ways to get rid of the sidebar space and reposition the useful links, such as via
this CSS/Javascript hack. But this method works just as well on free accounts as well as Premier accounts, so that takes away one incentive to even pay for Premier in the first place. And in either case, you're still going to see the sidebar space when you access your account from public or other people's computers.