How is this outage with no notification any different than the RIM outages that all the Apple employees were making fun of the other month?
When RIM goes down, your BlackBerry ceases to receive mail. BlackBerry's don't go out and check your accounts for new mail. They simply sit there, waiting for a RIM server to connect to them directly and push them new mail to show you. So when RIM goes down (and stops pushing mail), it doesn't matter where you have your email hosted (gmail, .Mac, Yahoo, AOL, your work email, etc), because you're not getting it on your BlackBerry.
When .Mac goes down, your .Mac email is unavailable. If you have other email accounts setup on your device, they're not affected.
The only poking at RIM that I've saw Apple do was point out that their device (the iPhone) doesn't funnel email through a centralized network setup like RIM does. For the iPhone to have an email outage that's the same as a RIM outage, all of AT&T's data network across North America would basically have to go down. I never saw anyone from Apple try to compare RIM to .Mac