I suspect the parent poster is talking about spam sent from gmail to non-gmail accounts - such as my own self-hosted mail-server.
I receive 5-20 spam messages a day from @gmail addresses. Not a huge number, but some days it jumps to 50-100. (These messages really did get routed through google, rather than being faked.)
Yes, email sent from gmail to non-gmail. I typically get ~25 spams/day originating from google (admittedly not all to the same destination address), but from time to time it jumps substantially.
I receive 5-20 spam messages a day from @gmail addresses. Not a huge number, but some days it jumps to 50-100. (These messages really did get routed through google, rather than being faked.)