Yes I also like Gulp - and it is my primary web build tool. However, I cannot use it for some of my other tasks including building TeX documents, compiling C/C++, deployment and packaging issues and much more.
At the moment I mainly use Jake, but in the past I’ve also used Make and Automake. The latter was a real time saver. Great comment about CMake - I do agree.
It’s great that you mention Scons. I actually did not know that - but it seems interesting. I’ve used Gyp naturally for building native Node.js modules, but that was only due to the lack of choices.
Thanks for your interesting comment!