People will. And when the will, Gulp will be ready. Today, there is a hundred plugins. Some of them will be easily converted. We can't wait for every tools to be streamable to begin to use them.

It remember me this talk. http://esdiscuss.org/topic/could-delete-methods-rename-to-remove

Let just grab this:  "The future is bigger than the past". Consider the callback introduced for buffers as the wk['delete'] cited in the thread.

As you told, jshint, uglify, stylus and others are great pieces of code. What's the cost of a small boilerplate to wrap them in a plugin ?