I agree w/ you about 90% on this. However, you're painting w/ a broad brush including Awk and Sed. I imagine beyond 10 lines of Awk (gsub, anyone?) or about 1 line of Sed things get tenuous, and you would want to reach for Perl or Python. Sed & Awk are great for tiny stuff, but wear thin fast. The realm of text-only problems, about 15 to 40 lines of code is where I find Perl shines. Python is probably my favorite language, but it can be horribly clunky for these sorts of tasks.
