No. The plugin uses maven dependency management to get the required libraries and native components depending on your operating system
Use a dependencies element in your plugin configuration to override the plugin dependency on ''com.google.gwt:gwt-user''. Please note this only works with maven 2.0.9 and later.
This plugin, being part of the Mojo Project, can benefict for a large community of maven developers. Its async interface generation feature is AFAIK not supported by other plugins.
gwt-dev JAR includes many libraries, including some Apache commons-* that you may use in your project with more recent version. Don't define gwt-dev as a dependency, the plugin will resolve it when necessary for you based on your gwt-user version.