I barely use Calendar or Contacts. I only use Gmail for the mail -- something everything else can do, too, and it's a far cry to call gmail something impressive. By web dev standards, it's a fairly basic application.
When I got my n7, I considered Reader to be the core of the core of the core of that device. As soon as I powered it up, I was on Reader instantly reading new posts from tens of blogs I like to follow. I wasn't interested in the magazines they wanted to throw at me because immediate digital publishing has pretty much killed the magazine/newspaper industry. So for me, reading news and tech articles on my Android device WAS Reader. That's a HUGE part of why the device was purchased.
Do I use it to gmail? No, maybe to read mail, but not to respond to it because typing more than a paragraph on a touch interface is maddening. Do I use it to sync contacts? No, it's not a social device for me. Do I use it to do calendary stuff? No, I do that on my phone, so syncing both of those are turned off. The device is a web browser, game console, and news consumption engine. What drove those were Chrome, the app store, and Reader. One would think those things would be held up by Google as core parts of the platform, but maybe they want to push their own news web portal and Currents. Who knows.
