This might be petty of me, but what I value most when it comes to email is the name. In my opinion I’d rather have a very short, easily remembered name rather than a long drawn out username. With Gmail, after spending literally an hour and a half trying to find a good username (less than 8 letters, one word, no numbers) I gave up.
I might be able to use Google Apps, but I don’t know if you can use the + sign in the email service.