[cwp]

It's intended for people that are building web stuff with node. So they're already writing everything in Javascript and already have a dependency on node, so using node for their build process eliminates a dependency on Make or whatever.

The incumbent in this niche is Grunt. Grunt has a rich ecosystem of plugins, but it's complex, difficult to configure and difficult to debug. Gulp is meant to be simpler and therefor easier to use.

Gulp is not meant to compete with Make, Maven or the like.