The people were charged because it was a criminal case. Had it been a civil action, they would have gone after the company. Pretty sure it's the same in the US.

Take a look south of the US border sometime. Most of the Central and South American population is of native descent. Of the ones that died, most didn't "chose" to, but died of imported diseases no one really had control over. The only large area of the Americas where natives were completely eradicated was North America, which happens to be the only area colonized largely by non-Catholic nations...

GPG is a command line tool. If you want to put a UI on it it involves the very sucky process of constructing a command line with the arguments for the action you wish to perform, invoking gpg and parsing the results. In short it is a big pain in the butt and error prone and is seriously hampering its adoption.

Have you heard of GPGME? It's the official library for using GnuPG from other programs, and it does everything you mentioned. From the application point of view, it's just the same as if the crypto operations were in a library.

It does have some performance problems, because it must run a new gpg process for every operation, but those will be fixed in the future.