One reason for this is that most warehouses are column-oriented. This means our table, which is 11 columns wide but pretty deep, is really fast to query.
We had a customer on a 3 Node (tiny) DS large Redshift warehouse dealing with billions of rows. Their Looker queries literally took 8 hours. We moved them to the Narrator structure and they saw the same queries assembled using the activity stream down to minutes (<5 minutes)
Edit: I should also point out that all queries in Narrator are compiled to SQL that runs directly on the warehouse. We don't use any external data stores or anything like that.