Motorola Droid :: Email App Vs GMail App And Push - Pull Notifications

Busy forum today, so I thought I would post this and try to get a response. Picked up the Droid/Motorola today and have been trying to figure out the Email App vs the GMail App and where I should tie my accounts in.

I have 4 GMail accounts, 2 Local ISP accounts, and 1 Exchange account. Setting up the Exchange account was pretty straight-forward and the phone put that account into the EMAIL application. The exchange account is also listed under the sync settings (since I assume exchange is pushed and therefore it gets labeled as a Sync On/Off ability). The local ISP accounts are POP and therefore also get placed into the EMAIL app due to them being pulled at my "every 5 minutes" setting.

The 4 GMail accounts are my real question. It basically comes down to this... Originally I setup the 4 accounts in the EMAIL app vs the GMAIL app; primarily because thats what I thought I needed to do. The problem I was was having though, is I wasn't receiving my email notifications and/or not receiving my email in a timely manner (push). I then figured out how to set them up in the GMAIL app and moved 2 of the accounts over there and ran some tests.

Emails sent to the 2 accounts in the GMAIL app were pushed to the device nearly instantly. Often times I would receive notification on the device before I got them on my desktop. The emails sent to the gmail accounts on the EMAIL app didn't notify me until the fetch timer (5 minutes) kicked in.

Now even though the auto-configure feature of the EMAIL app when setting up the gmail account defaulted to IMAP rather than POP, I wouldn't think that IMAP would be quicker. I guess it doesn't matter, it all depends on the fetch frequency in your settings.

The problem is, I like, almost love, the combined Inbox feature of the EMAIL application. I also like the account color-coding it does to make reading emails in the combined inbox easier. From what I can tell, the GMAIL app doesn't have such a feature and I need to Menu>>All Accounts>>Select Account>>Open Email to read an incoming message. I assume the GMail app takes advantage of Google Sync and therefore pushes your email to the device, but apparently this isn't available in the EMAIL app itself?