Yes, completely agreed. There's a continuum of UX between BI tools like Tableau/Qlikview and the interactive prompts used by most data scientists (mainly around the non-interactivity of display)- it's sad that an 80 character static tty display is still the state of the art in that space. While I'm very comfortable in ipython/terminal I often wish I could easily pop up a Tableau interface on top of my pandas analysis. Jupyter is getting there slowly but the widgets people are building are still more geared toward display than interacting with data (both original and derived) directly. Even the new set of SAAS BI tools (Looker, Mode, etc) leave interaction as a secondary concern. I think that's the main difference between tools geared towards reporting/publishing (most of the BI world) and tools geared toward data analysis (R, python, etc). As you point out, the tools for data analysis are years behind the BI tools in terms of UI/UX (or their focus is more on IDEs for developers rather than analysts).

As a side note, I've been following your work for a while now (both Superconductor and Graphistry) - mind if I shoot you a few questions privately?