>awk is a fantastic command line application that is useful for filtering, basic computations and transformations that other basic utilities (e.g. cut, sort, etc.) + grep don't (readily/easily) provide.

All true.

But awk is also a programming language, not just a command line application or utility.

It has conditionals, loops, regexes, file handling, string handling, (limited) user-definable functions, hashes (associative arrays), reporting abilities and more.

In fact, the name of the original book about awk is The Awk Programming Language.