Me too. I did everything required to get my authorship to show up. Now that it's gone, it's kind of frustrating to have put in the effort. Just like it's frustrating to have no less than seven different g+ public interfaces, between my work account, business page, newer personal gmail account, older personal gmail account, account being used by my wife and myself, and these weird alternate Youtube versions of two or three of the above.
I called a client today to discuss them signing up for webmaster tools. The most frustrating part of the conversation was a discussion about dealing with the other Google "stuff" that comes with the new Google account they'll be making. Do they want to use the new email address for anything? What if it accidentally gets out? Etc.
That was the strangest part for me. Google+ forced an odd hybrid between my personal and business activities, but it wasn't absolute. I couldn't tell you how many google interfaces I have right now, I'd have to count them and go through a few while logged in to make sure it was complete.
It wasn't that much work, but I suspect they could have improved their user testing on how multiple identities worked.
Maybe they were just targeting the median user, but that is likely a mistake if you miss all the evangelists.
Note that you can sign up for a Google account without signing up for GMail. Just click the "I prefer to use my current email address" link underneath the username box in the signup flow.
I called a client today to discuss them signing up for webmaster tools. The most frustrating part of the conversation was a discussion about dealing with the other Google "stuff" that comes with the new Google account they'll be making. Do they want to use the new email address for anything? What if it accidentally gets out? Etc.