Gestures is one of my favorite features... I can set it to swipe up and go to the home page, two finger swipe to do something else, all kinds of options. Plus you can add multiple dock pages at the bottom of the screen... and another favorite is to change the number of icons on a page, I don't even remember what the normal grid is because I have mine set to portrait grid of 5 x 6.
I have used Nova for a while, and now I'm really enjoying Apex... both of which I believe were created starting with at least 4.x ADW and Go Launcher, and a few others have been around before 4.x and have some legacy code to work with older versions of Android... nothing wrong with that... I have used each, but I still really prefer Apex right now... just my personal preference.