Not unneeded. Sorry I don't want my GPS program running forever in the background killing my battery. That or any other program for that matter that i'm not using. It's a matter of CPU usage or anything like that, it's a matter of battery usage, sorry but if you leave a running app in the background, more battery gets used to keep it running. If they had a close on all apps, this wouldn't be a problem... unfortunately that is not the case.
I will leave certain programs running, most I kill off.