Regarding the verge review, the guy is complaining that gestures from outside do different things than gestures inside an app.

Duh! Then what would be the point of outside gestures? If they weren't really nice and productive neither apple (ios7 control center), google(chrome) mozilla(latest FirefoxOS), nor BlackBerry (BB10) would have implemented them.

So it isn't even unfamilliar (which he confuses as unintuitive) while the exact same gestures on the N9 were unfamilliar back then.

Comparing everything with android and saying they should go with it is stupid, it's like saying that all other car manufacturers should stop producing their cars and quit because the corolla is the most popular car in the world.

Regarding email push, N9 had perfectly good push email functionality. (In fact it was the only part of fenix I liked) My gmail messages appeared faster on the N9 than the GMail web interface.