While WoW's gathering system is more integrated, it gets extremely annoying when you're in a no-fly zone and have to go out of your way while questing just to get a certain mat (*shudders at the things I'd do to get more Anchorweed). So I'm perfectly content to have it as a separate class. Especially since the nodes are in fixed locations instead of being in various random locations depending on RNG.

Usually, I try to gather knowing what I'm after so when I'm i! the appropriate zone, I can just switch my class.