This is a good workaround.
By opening a Gerber in Gerbview, and exporting it to KiCad, you can recover:
1). Board outline with mounting hole positions.
2). All tracks.
3). Usually pads (These are not really in Gerbers).
Pads are exported as THT holes, and require a bit of hand work. The usual way is to first recover or redraw the schematic and assign footprints, and then import the Footprints in Pcbnew. These footprints can than easily be aligned with the recovered coordinates from the pads in the gerbers, and after that they can be easily deleted.
It still requires manual effort, but it is a nice feature to have such an import capability available.