Full disclosure, I'm the guy that hans mentioned that works at HG, currently doing Level 2 tech support. Just a few things I should make clear first, however:

1.) No, I can't give you any special deals (you missed the godaddyisdown thing, it seems :/ )
2.) Can't do any off the clock support, which is probably against my NDA anyway. Just thought I'd answer your questions from my own perspective. Also, I'm at somebody's house and reached the 10th or so page on reddit, so now I'm just sitting around reading email.
3.) I can neither confirm nor deny rumors of any post-it note nyan cat in the Austin office.


Today I wanted to convert one of my business email accounts from pop3 to imap.  I already have an add on email account so I can store more email.  I had to pay even more for imap.

Wow. :P

So we can't transfer mail from GoDaddy, because GoDaddy doesn't use cPanel, nor do they provide direct access to the mbox/Maildir. Your best bet, if you would prefer not to lose all of your email when you change MX records, would be to either keep hosting email at godaddy and point your MX records at GoDaddy mail servers (internally we have a script for this, so you could email support@ and say "change my mx records to godaddy" and somebody will just do it), or you could sign up for Google Apps and use their POP/IMAP importing thingy. There's a Google KB article about it somewhere.
 

Also I'm thinking of configuring access via SSH which I can do with HostGator.  Much to my surprise HG charges a one time fee of $10 per domain to open SSH.

For subaccounts under your reseller account. The main reseller account is free, as is SSH access on any shared plan. 

Just one other thing: If you find the need to go to a VPS/dedi for the resources, please do not select a level 3 VPS, which is the default when you go to http://hostgator.com/vps-hosting. You will almost certainly run out of memory. When we say level 5+ VPS, we really mean it! :P

Any other questions -> support@hostgator.com