FYI, the latest Jupyter + matplotlib have interactive plotting inline with "%matplotlib notebook". The server must be running for this to work (so you can't interact with static ipynb files in nbviewer, for example), but a static version of the plot is generated for static notebooks. There are also some changes coming down the line to expose the traits of matplotlib plots so that libraries like mpld3 can be integrated more seamlessly.
Yeah, most of our curriculum uses regular old matplotlib. We only use this technique specifically in our D3 curriculum. In general I can't think of many use cases where this is actually better than just having a couple of files, aside from instructional ones.
Yeah, I've been using Jupyter with inline plotting and it's really quite nice. A notebook that's not tied to proprietary software (i.e. Mathematica) and which can run a full-fledged programming language is a marvelous tool.
(Also, Hi Christian!)