The Gallery widget is such an upgrade over the List View widget.
Since the List view controls have been deprecated and are not supported anymore this upgrade becomes sooner a must.
However, the ability to use templates for specialized entities like the List view widget supports is lacking, making apps using this with the list view upgrading not trivial.
My understanding is that the Gallery widget was advertised to become the preferred choice for listing objects in the new future-proof client over the Listview widget. Support for specializations (with templates) is a much needed addition for this to actually be the case.