I really like make and use it when it makes sense but I'm failing to see the advantages to doing something like this (other than support for make being fairly ubiquitous).

To accomplish the same/similar thing with gulp in one of my projects:

    var gulp = require('gulp');
    var less = require('gulp-less');
    var concat = require('gulp-concat');
    var minifyCSS = require('gulp-minify-css');
    var rename = require('gulp-rename');

    gulp.task('styles', function() {
    	return gulp.src(['assets/styles/**/*.less'])
    		.pipe(less())
    		.pipe(concat('app.css'))
    		.pipe(rename({suffix: '.min'}))
    		.pipe(minifyCSS())
    		.pipe(gulp.dest('www/css/'))
    });

The make example is really cool but I'd be lost if I needed to modify it even ever so slightly. Maybe this speaks more to my lack of experience using the sed/tr/etc but make just seems more complicated to manage. That's just my two cents.