Right now total device acceleration (user acceleration plus acceleration from gravity) is exposed as a sensor type. This is useful on its own, but some devices/APIs also expose individual user acceleration and gravity sensors as well (I know iOS does for sure). They're more expensive because I think they need gyroscope data internally to compute the split, but it's also pretty useful to have access to those when they're supported. I don't think they should replace the total acceleration sensor type.
For reference here's some iOS APIs for them: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmdevicemotion?language=objc