First, the unsurprising part: yet another convenient, beneficial feature from Google for practically no money. Indeed, the only surprise about this one is that it is not literally free. Since the debut of Gmail five years ago, Google has offered ever-increasing amounts of free storage for each account. It started out at one gigabyte and is now over 7 GB. (Background from the Official Gmail Blog here.) Since you can create multiple accounts, in theory you can have as much storage as you'd ever want, all without cost.
I have a bunch of accounts for various purposes -- different mailing lists etc. But it's convenient to have one main account, so you can search for old messages or attachments without skipping around. My main personal Gmail account is so clogged with pictures, PDFs, article drafts, etc that it is closing in on the 7GB ceiling. Since Gmail does not let you search or sort past messages by size, there is not a quick and easy way to get rid of the lunkers with the 10MB attachments. So I was glad to see the good-news announcement last week: a lot more Gmail storage, for a ridiculously low price.
The first 20GB of additional storage is $5 per year, and onward at proportional rates up to 16TB ( > 16,000 GB) of storage. Pricing details here; Google account sign-in required.