Very nice indeed, but I think a lot of the appeal with grep/sed/awk/wc/etc. is a. they are (somewhat, with irritating differences in some cases) cross-platform

Very nice indeed, but I think a lot of the appeal with grep/sed/awk/wc/etc. is a. they are (somewhat, with irritating differences in some cases) cross-platform and available in every unix-y environment and b. people are simply very used to them, not to mention that there are going to be circumstances where a single interpreter reading a command is not going to be as succinct/powerful/flexible as a series of piped commands. As an alternative to perl -pe it is very interesting indeed.