Full disclosure, I work for Scrapinghub and the web UI you speak of is Portia - our open source visual web scraper. It's for those who range from non-technical to technical but want a quick way to scrape data. I think it's extremely important to develop tools to democratize the acquisition of data regardless of technical background and skill. Glad you find the article and tool interesting!
Probably world changing, when considering that even semi-technical folks can cook up tools to dig into things like this.
I know this tool was by a developer, but scrapinghub has web UI to make scrapers.