It would be amazing if Home Assistant could support all the features of the Hue Lightstrip Gradient !! 
Totally agree. It just hit me as I’m getting into HA, and slowly converting things over from HUE, that I have a few gradient strips.
I would also love to see this. Not having to use a bridge would be great.
This is something I’m looking for a while too. Scenes should support it too.
There are more people that want this: Color gradient for led strips
I found a way to use gradient with the hue lights. Via hue integration it was not possible at all, with the zigbee2mqtt it is possible, as it comes with “gradient scenes” select entity. They are preset, but at least there are a lot of them.
This is not the implementation we hope for, but it’s better than no gradient.
It may need some workarounds and tricks. E.g. I need to turn the light on before activating a scene.
I recently jumped from the hue integration with the bridge to using Z2MQTT via a SkyConnect. Everything worked perfectly, save for my gradient lightstrip. I can manually control it just fine, but if I try to add it to a scene, it will not set the gradient I selected. I think it’s because the scene is also applying brightness/color/light temp at the same time.
In the end I ended up creating an automation that watches for scenes that would involve the strip to get triggered. To apply a gradient I first turn the strip on, and then select the gradient scene option to what I want. Still very awkward and it would be great to just have native control over each zone of the strip. If nothing else just to allow for more than the (large) list of presets