It's about Gulp 3, but Gulp 4 is already in beta and around the corner...
Although personally I find I'm much more productive using straight npm scripts instead of gulp
No, you haven't explained perfectly why. And yes, they work much better because there is no extra gulp wrapper around them. If you are happy with gulp good for you, but it's mostly unnecessary.
No, it's not that simple if you want to copy certain files from A to B and C, other files from A to D etc
I really don't see why I should be spawning servers or shell scripts etc from within gulp when it works much better just running them directly.