> So back to the days where you could make a Google account with any email address
You can still do that, and it's not some obscure feature but asked about on the first page of the account creation flow with the "use my current email address instead" button. It'll be a fully functional Google account, except for supporting mail, and can be changed to a gmail account later (that feature is obscure though).
My guess would be that these legacy accounts will end up as something different than a consumer Google account created with a non-gmail address, but guess we'll see once it launches.
