the MVP pattern has nothing in common with GWT's Place/History management framework (often referred to as GWT MVP). If you use GWT places/activities your app will gain bookmarkable urls that represent a place/application state and whenever such a url is visited a corresponding activity will be started. This activity is then responsible for attaching some UI/widgets to an area of your webpage. If this UI is complex and has user interaction elements then you could implement this UI with the MVP pattern to separate the UI from the logic that will be performed when the user interacts with this UI. And once you decide to use the MVP pattern then its in most cases easier to let the activity be the presenter. But its also possible to implement a separate presenter and let the activity hold a reference to it.

The kinds of changes to Activities and Places we're contemplating for future versions of GWT are primarily along the lines of using annotations and generators to automate the creation of PlaceTokenizers and ActivityMappers, for example. We're not talking about wholesale replacement, as we strive for API backward compatibility with each release.