For me, it's not that I'm afraid of GMail removing IMAP, it's that Gmail IMAP works really, really bad. For an email-client to work well with Gmail, it has to be tailored to Gmail, and that has given me some issues lately. For instance, most of my mail is sorted into labels, skipping the inbox. When using a mail client with IMAP, these labels shows as folders. Deleting the mail from my client, doesn't delete it from…
And just for added measure, deleting the label seems to me to be the right thing to do.