Actually I feel that sometimes in the quest to be minimalist we go overboard. Am minimalist myself so this is not directed at anybody in particular. Now gmail notifier, its a tiny app (around 300kb download I think) which makes the task of gmail as default client a breeze, but many of us will go to extraordinary lengths to circumvent that. I noticed the OP's other post about avoiding a 3rd party unzipping utility.
All of us have these beast like computers these days with mammoth hard disks and lots of spare RAM, but we are obsessed about disabling windows components, shutting down services, removing this and deleting that. This is a lesson I have learnt myself- to just sit back and enjoy (win7 indeed lets you do that) instead of always poking and fingering.
Again, this is just a rant, no offense meant.