Until I read the second I was going to say to your first paragraph "then the company clearly doesn't value BI enough to warrant the existence of a BI team".

It's probably more a symptom of upper management valuing neither the core team nor the BI team, thinking software writes itself, and business insights come for free with the MBA. We're really in the same boat here. All the more reason for core team to make nice hooks for the BI team. They won't be appreciated by management, they probably won't be appreciated by the customers, but at least they can be appreciated by each other.