Cool, I've read good things about grunt but haven't had the time to look into it. Its direct access to the CLI thats the killer for me with make ... and to be frank ... if I was going to script in a third party language it would probably be python and not javascript but each to there own.

Don't rely too much on Grunt, only use Grunt/Gulp when npm scripts doesn't do the trick. npm scripts has the same direct command invocation that make has so no need for plugins.