I think the suggestion was to get your own domain. You can use gmail as a service and if they kick you off you still own your domain and your email address. If you're smart you might backup the email. That's fairly easy to do.
Yep. Ideally you get some sort of actual paid email account, with someone that only provides email (so you don't have issues elsewhere that lead to loss of email account), and then you get your own domain (with no other services that you're using), and forward your gmail to that domain, and point your personal domain's MX records to the new email address, and start using an email address on your personal domain from here on out, but failing the separate email, at least getting a domain and pointing an email address to your current Gmail account, and starting to use that new address instead, gives you a migration path to reduce your reliance on Gmail.
In the extremely unlikely event that happens (provided you pick a registrar whose only service you're using is DNS), then you transfer it to another one, as mandated by ICANN. You're down a week, but everything is fine after that. Quit being contrarian.
It's a bit like getting struck by lightning, you deal with this when it happens if it happens. This is sufficiently unlikely for most people that it's not worth being too concerned about it when other exceedingly more dangerous and pressing matters could be dealt with using that same energy.
