I guess you can look at it a lot of ways. PP charges the 3% fee in return for a service. In my eyes, they provide two key things.
1. Fast money transaction. The seller get's his money fast and the buyer gets his item faster because the seller can ship sooner. This benefit is clean and clear.
2. Protection. Both the buyer and seller have protection. Here is the gray area. I have been fortunate enough to not have to go through this, but it seems a lot of scams are being done with the usage of pay pal. Somehow, people are able to get the buyers money not either not send the product or send the product not as expected. It seems like in more cases the buyer is SOL with little help from pp. This has put a bad taste in a lot of peoples mouths.
Regardless, just because you don't like the service, that does not give you the right to cheat the service and bypass their fees.
But again, what are you really cheating? By sending payment via gift, you waive all protections. So now you only have the benefit of number 1 and not number 2. Clearly PP is aware of this. I am sure they are not fools. I am sure they are aware that people are making sales with the gift function. As I look at paypal and how they advertise their service, they are big on protection. They key off of it. It was the main reason I signed up for the service many years ago. Maybe they are ok with this, maybe...
I put this post up just to let people know. I saw a lot of what would be borderline braking the rules as far as paypal transactions go. This is just a friendly FYI. As for me, I don't mind paying the fee when I am selling. I do factor it in. IMO, it is just a part of doing business. I also don't mind bypassing the fee and do it at my own risk.