But have you had consistently good experience with Google Gemini and Google apps? Or read the mixed reviews?

For me, Gemini has been hit or miss and somehow less useful than Assistant was 2+ years ago.

The coding assistant for VSCode is nuts (i.e. gets it wrong a lot, also one time it just got so confused).

I have Gemini Pro for free for a year because I bought a Pixel phone, it answers very fast, so I like it. Let's see how I'll feel about shelling out real money when the subscription ends. But on the phone, I still use Assistant (and just have a shortcut to launch the webpage in my browser), because the phone was forcing Gemini, but after 5 minutes of usage I found it was slower for my usages (usually I just tell it to set an alarm and add a reminder/calendar event), and when I asked about my tasks, Gemini would get the task listing from Google Tasks, and keep it in its history... that'll pollute my chat history!