Maybe you could do a "I can do data science in a GUI" talk and amaze us all (addressing all points the OP made). Hadley has been working for years on making data science programming with R accessible: development of expressive domain-specific APIs, books freely available online, etc.
The point of this kind of UI is that they become an extension of yourself. Saying these UI are old and clunky is exactly like saying a keyboard is old and clunky.