It’s been quite a while ago that I discovered (per coincidence) the “Object” output is very useful for placing spherical gradient textures in the middle of an object… haven’t seen that in any tutorial before (or I didn’t notice?). Before that, I only knew you could place a different source e.g. an Empty in the Texure Coordinate’s “Object” property field, to manipulate and animate texture mapping or simply to vary the texture between different objects with the same material. Even the Blender manual only focuses on having a different object as source and doesn’t say anything about leaving it blank.
