I think this is just pissing users off. I want to import my contacts into Google+, but I currently have no desire to leave Facebook. After seeing this, that changes a bit.
FYI, if you go into Google+ and go to your account settings, you'll see a link called "Data Liberation." This link will allow you to download all of your data -- contacts, posts, pictures; everything -- and take it wherever you like. The Data Liberation Front is Google's project to make sure that you can withdraw your data from all Google sites as you please.
Does the export include email addresses? Facebook offers an "export" too, but you just end up with HTML pages with your friends' names and no contact info.
How it works is you get all your contacts, and the data you're authorized to see. So, people who you're just following and aren't sharing anything with you, just appear as Google Plus links. People who have you in their circles and are sharing their email address with you will also have their email address attached.
I just downloaded it, because I didn't know the answer. It's better than that, actually -- you get full vCard collections of all your contact groups, with a fully populated vCard for each contact.
The Data Liberation Front is a good first step but providing content in the form of a zip file is pretty useless. True data portability is much tougher and probably isn't worth an investment from a company like Google if it were even something they wanted to do.
Disclaimer: I'm bootstrapping OpenPhoto on Kickstarter
I saw that option - it's nice. I just wish I could liberate my gmail data too. Almost half a million emails, and I'd like to have a gzip of them in case something happened.
I use getmail to backup my Gmail (per that link), but there is still data loss. You can either use POP and lose your labels or use IMAP and lose your unread status (IMAP mode marks everything as read - someone patched getmail to offer a "leave unread" option but the maintainer refuses to accept any such patches).
Also, Google throttles your downloads - on POP this takes the form of returning just a few emails per download. It took me about three months to have a full backup at home, and I'm a paying customer (~30gb of mail on Apps Premier or whatever they're calling it today).
If this "read mail" thing is a problem for you why don't you just patch the software? Yes, a .tar.bz dl link in GMail would probably be nice, but sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. If the maintainer doesn't want the patch, patch it yourself and host it on Github/Bitbucket/Google Code/etc.
I know, I just think Gmail should have a built in interface. It'd also be nice to be able to only download emails with a certain label, in a specific period of time, etc.
