I use it multiple times a week for printing/copying tabular data from space-delimited files. It's not the most arcane usage but it would probably take several lines to do what awk does in one. I don't even know much awk! Learning any bit of awk is worth every moment of the investment.

    cat somefile.txt | awk '{ print $1 "\t" $2 }'

On mac I pipe to `pbcopy`. Saves me several minutes each time.