I use sed & awk all the time. It is an invaluable tool while debugging issues, extracting fields from log files etc. I am not dissing python or perl, I use python extensively as well. But while you are in the middle of an incident, hard to beat a quick oneliner, like this random example.
awk -F":" 'BEGIN{total=0}{if($3>240)total+=$3}END{print total}' /etc/passwd