Google Checkout is a good example, the founders and the accountant all needed access when we were using it. It's much easier to create one account we all shared - than grant access to all 3 accounts, for all things accounting related.

Additionally some services - and I think Google Checkout was one - do not allow you to grant access to others at all, so if you started such an account in the accountants name, everytime a founder wanted to check out the balance, we’d need to get the accountant’s password.

(Also you never know when signing up weather this will be the case for a service - thankfully I’ve not seen any new "single account" services launch for a couple of years, but I’m still wary.)

Google Checkout allows (allowed) granting access to other accounts.

Cool - so not checkout, there are still plenty of google services that don't/didn't and sorting them out is not easy.