This is 100% true. A coworker of mine implemented an elevation-bitmap-to-3d-model conversion tool in 160 lines of Awk. It ran faster than our "good" Matlab tool by a factor of 10.

Awk (or Perl) doubles the usefulness of Unix. Most of the common commands in Unix are query commands. When you need to start manipulating queried data, Awk is where the rubber meets the road. Piping data through the shell stops being read-only, and becomes interactive.