They've even changed the minimap so that addons cannot change the appearance of nodes on the minimap. Farewell magenta stars, I shall miss thee.

you can certainly run a gathermate type map on a non gathering toon, but that just gets you in the area, you won't be able to see if nodes are actually there without the video fx. Personally I just overlay the minimap of the gatherer over the leaders, as long as they are close together there are no navigation issues if you do that and you save real estate on adding a second one.