Quirks of the new .Mac Groups feature

While playing around with the shiny new Groups feature of the recently upgraded .Mac service I stumbled on some interesting tidbits in the FAQ's I thought y'all might be interested in.

First: anyone who wants to join a .Mac Group has to have a .Mac ID – including Windows XP and Linux users. I don't know about you, but this seems like a bit of a stretch to force non-.Mac members to sign up for a trial membership and be subjected to all the trial propaganda emails just to take part in a Group. Sure, the user can still use the .Mac ID to access the group after the trial expires, but it still seems like some out-of-place marketing to me.

Second: Group iDisk space is etched in stone at 100 MB. You can't allocate more or less from your iDisk, and at this time there's no way to even buy more storage for your group if you wanted to. Seems a little shortsighted to me.

Now don't get me wrong. If you checked out our most recent podcast you'd know I'm a .Mac lover, and I've already set up a couple groups for personal and academic use, but I'm curious: What does everyone think about this new Groups feature of .Mac?