Finally, my prayers have been heard and my Gmail account was upgraded to the newer version. It is as sweet as was promised. Message pre-loading makes sorting through mail in morning extremely fast. New contact manager is indeed much better than the old, dare I say, address book.  It still misses a few things, like fields for URLs.
Now I’m waiting for all those Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts that I use to beautify and customize Gmail to get updated and work with the new version.