What is gvfs and why should I want it on my system?

What does gvfs do for me on my Kubuntu machine and why is /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gdu-volume-monitor eating so much CPU time? BTW: I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GVFS and still don't know what's in it for me, especially on KDE / Kubuntu. lsof shows me that thunderbird, firefox and pidgin have gvfs libraries open, but for what functionality?