At the moment, Microsoft says, Outlook.com has 60 million active members, a third of which are Gmail users. (Presumably some of those are true defectors from Gmail, while others use both Gmail and Outlook.com.) Once the Hotmail transition is complete, Outlook.com will have hundreds of millions of users, giving it the same sort of massive scale as Gmail (425 million users as of June 2012) and Yahoo Mail (281 million users as of December 2012).
CNN: Goodbye Hotmail, hello Outlook