I've been playing with my new ZU (love it) and am still running stock (non-root) because of airwatch.
I have found out that many apps can be run from SD even if you don't root (can be moved there - same as on my Note 3).
As far as GPS apps, it turns out that Navigon can completely run from SD, and also it's maps can be stored on SD. The trick is to not move already installed Navigon app to SD - if you do that it will only move the app itself to SD but leave the maps in internal memory. Instead I had to do the following: 1. uninstall navigon 2. make sure SD card is inserted 3. install navigon again - then when you start the app the first time it will recognize the SD card and ask you where you want the maps installed. That worked perfectly for me and was able to reclaim 3GB of internal memory.
Unfortunately Sygic which is my prefered GPS app does not seem to have this option to install data on SD (never asked me about this during installation, and I don't see anything in the settings either).
Still, this is a good result - shows that when apps are designed properly the data can reside on SD without need for root.
Next task is to find a good car driving game which will want to completely live on SD (at least it's data since I assume if good graphics the game must be huge).
Yes, apps that generates large quotas of data are able to write to sdcard to save space.
Then also its up to the devs to enable it. Some apps don't.
I discovered yesterday that in order to write data to sdcard1 I had to go to the documents app and manually permit RootExplorer to have access to the file I was going to write to. This was just a simple .txt file with some notes I wanted to remember so...eh I found this quite annoying.
So there are some new policies that I haven't done research on.