well , hotmail is owned by microsoft, and definetly got public using it. Personally i prefer to use yahoo or gmail instead of hotmail, due to it's slow spead, and space issues. I don't like live hotmail as well.
I don't use Hotmail at all. It's just not right for me. My first email adress was on yahoo, I think. I know that many sites don't accept hotmail, so why try it out if I have gmail and yahoomail accounts?