The bad part is that Google announced 60+ days before the change took effect that the account would become read-only. Nowhere did they state the account would be terminated, or could not indefinitely remain in a read-only state. Then, they suddenly spring a 7 day deadline to download all your data, with no previous mention.
I'd assume it couldn't remain in read only forever. But yeah since it's data loss Google should be very loud about that eventuality. I was getting weekly emails from dropbox about my inactive account before they nuked it.
Very poor communication from Google.