Hey arrowrand, I think the argument you are having with Miller amounts to nothing but a misunderstanding.
But its not. I made reference to that your point in my reply to him.
Here's how the whole thing goes for me.
EAS isn't free. That, right there, as a business decision for Google would be enough for me.
EAS is not perfect. I added my Google account to my Lumia and my contacts appeared to sync, but were horribly screwed up.
1. Contacts that had more than 3 or 4 phone numbers only had those first few imported as numbers. All the rest were added as text notes.
Big deal, right? I have a spam contact with over 200 phone numbers. My phone forwards all of those calls immediately to Google Voice where that caller is blocked. It is a big deal. To me. My Lumia only saw the first few phone numbers.
2. Any phone number that wasn't described as home, office or work was ignored.
3. Any contact with more than two addresses had the excess ignored.
4. Any contact with a custom description for their address had it ignored. Meaning, if I listed your work address as "South Office" it wasn't imported at all, it was ignored.
5. Business contacts with more than one contact person added were ignored. Not that the contact was added with only one person listed, the entire contact was simply left out.
I did try deleting the sync data and did an export/import of my data the hard way. Same exact result.
I may have had more issues than that, but that's all I saw. I removed my account from the phone, put my main SIM back in my Nexus and that the was that.
You can say that the issues that I had were specifically because of Google's CardDAV implementation, but that doesn't really matter.
EAS and Google contacts don't mix well for many people. EAS has serious limitations, and MS wants money for it.
I'm not inclined to leave Google's services. If you and you're all in with MS, WP8, outlook.com and EAS then go. Export your data from Google, import it to Outlook and be done.
Me, I like the Lumia and WP8 is growing on me. The limitations in Outlook.com are more than I can get used to.