For me personally, yes (although you can still use your email client with the mailing list feature of Discourse, so it isn’t quite that black-and-white as “email or not”, just to be clear for others). I want to optimize for what I think is the common case for people out there on top of the various benefits that I flat-out can’t get with a mailing list from an admin perspective. Add to that my belief that people are more likely to simply not start or will stop participating rather than change their email client, and that leads me to advocate for this choice/compromise.
Ok, we’ll see how things pan out. If I depend on a discussion that becomes unreadable, I’ll call you and moderators for help.
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I think we need to consider the benefits of Discourse not only as a user/consumer, but also as the value added for the maintainers/mailing list administrators.
From what I gather, the admins prefer administering Discourse than administering mailing list, because of features like flagging and splitting threads. Since the number of administrators are much less than the number of users, I feel that we need to add more weight to the voice of the administrators in this regard.
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Well, NNTP is much less common these days than it used to be, so I think NNTP offers a good example of how a technology can fade even if it’s better in certain situations than its successor(s) 
Having said that, my personal preference for email is not about threading, it’s that it is a “push” technology - my mail client is running and everything just appears there for my action, with no effort needed on my part. Email as notification doesn’t do that (a notification still requires me to switch to the thing that notified me, and to find my context in that), and email gateways in my experience typically end up being more or less clumsy, due to the mismatch between interaction models (if you’re not sure that’s true, consider the converse of trying to follow a mailing list like python-ideas via a mail-to-Discourse gateway - I suspect it’d be somewhat awkward to do so).
+1. A huge hidden cost of the mailing lists is moderator stress and burnout. I remain ambivalent on Discourse at the moment, but I am conscious that I am mostly unaware of one of the key benefits.
Seeing the results of better moderation (well-focused threads, with digressions being split off in a way that doesn’t disrupt either the main thread or the digression) will be something we can all gain from - but whether people will actually be comfortable with that level of moderation (or whether the moderators even want to be that “hands on”) remains to be seen. The benefit may remain hidden behind the scenes.
This is somewhat unrelated. Maybe it should be a different topic, or a branch somehow. It’s not about mail clients, but more about workflow patterns. If there’s a “good Discourse etiquette” means of branching off a related but different topic, I’d appreciate knowing. In email, I’d either just continue the digression under the same thread, or edit the subject of my reply and leave it at that.
One thing that I’m noticing, as I start to try out Discourse a little more, is that because I’m not always in Discourse, I don’t continually skim threads (which I do with email - yeah I know, that’s a bit sad, I read everything that pours into my inbox…). So my participation here follows more of a “drop in, quick skim, post a batch of replies” format. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse - I don’t feel like my responses are as considered as they would be on email, but again it’s early days to form a firm view.
So it’s not so much “stop participating” as “drop into conversations randomly”…