It's well established that Google's support system is close to non-existant for non-paying customers. Does it suck? Yes. There's definitely tons of room for improvement. But at the end of the day they're still providing you with tons of free, accessible products that are some of the best in the business (paid or not). This isn't much more than any other free service provider on the internet offers these days: half-official forums for free customers, direct support lines for the paying.

But regarding "freeing" your data from Google, it's hilarious trying to see people argue that it's somehow difficult or hidden. It's not. Takeout lets you grab all of your social information. Any popular desktop mail client can connect to Gmail over IMAP and automatically download every last e-mail in your account. I click one checkbox on Google Docs and then hit download to have a backup, or I can connect through WebDAV using a popular FTP client. There are similar easy solutions for Picasa, Calendar, and the rest. Just because they don't provide you with one shiny big button to do all the work for you doesn't mean they don't provide you with very accessible ways to backup your data offline.

At the end of the day, an automated system did what it was designed to do. Google should definitely work on it's customer service channels, but until then I'll happily continue to use their free services and backup on a scheduled basis.