Thanks, @Ruvox!
Your suggestions make sense, but just to answer the first question: apart from the points listed the GPS is also used to find the nearest land displayed at the top of "My Lands" list.
As for the warehouse requiring presence on a base: it's one of the things that gives bases meaning and value.
We don't want everything to be done remotely and if there's nothing that can be done only while being on a base there's no reason to actually place your base in a frequently visited area.
This leads to players thinking "oh, so it's actually much better to place your first base some place you're unlikely to visit ever again and advance your land from home instead!" and that messes up the entire game process; we've had this situation before and it motivated people to move their base soon after they start playing.
However, among those players many couldn't find the option of moving your base (despite all the texts, tooltips and pop-ups about it ) and thought that they've screwed up the game from the first step of the tutorial, which lead to players giving up / uninstalling the game / never coming back.
At the same time the step of establishing your first base cannot be rearranged and must always be the first thing you do in the game (as otherwise you can't collect resources and lands wouldn't advance anything). And forcing the players to wait before establishing the first base is disastrous for retention of new players (if someone can't play the game they've decided to try straight away they're not going to bother coming back later when they are "in the right spot"). And so on and so forth, the list of issues continues.
So as you can see, it's a seemingly small feature, but a lot of planning went into it!
In fact, it is very much possible that more features will be added in the future that can only be activated while being present on any of your bases.
In any case, I appreciate the suggestions regarding the UI and button shortcuts; I will see what can be done about these!