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To really understand how to use ROS for higher level functions, it is best to go through ALL the links in http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials

I believe you have understood what gmapping requires correctly. What you are missing now is the tf, so the logical next step is to look into the tf tutorials (which is under "Tutorials for other libraries" in the main tutorials page). After that, you might want to further understand how to use the navigation stack.

A "shortcut" for learning how to use ROS for robots is to look for robots with good documentation, like turtlebot. Then go into the launch files to see how things are done.