This article's primary example is a single static text file with 5M lines. Sure, in that case, awk works great, but how often does that come up? In the real world, those 5M lines are growing by several hundred thousand every day, and after a few months, grows beyond what a single computer or awk can handle. Further, users want real-time results, not just a few times a day when your cron script runs.

Unix commands are great up to a few GBs of data, Excel is even better if you're dealing with less than a few tens of MBs. But to deal with Terabytes of data quickly and efficiently, these tools totally break down.