My understanding is that the userfacing tool is still the ancient Java tool Palantir's been hawking since what, 2006? and that the several HTML5 rewrites haven't worked well [1].
Yep, that tool, Palantir Gotham, formerly known as Palantir Government, is a giant tangle of Swing/Spring dependency injected AbstractAutowiringFactoryBeans, but it is pretty powerful when configured correctly.
Most BI tools are based around tabular data and charting (i.e. Tableau). But Gotham is the best tool I've seen for exploring graphical (i.e. nodes + edges) data.
The only other thing in the space worth using is IBM's Analyst's Notebook. That's why Palantir (including Shyam Sankar, quoted in the OP) used some dirty tricks [0] to undercut i2, the company (later acquired by IBM) that developed Analyst's Notebook.
i2's claims are astonishing. Can't help but think that, had the nationalty of the firms involved been the other way around, the Justice Dept would have prosecuted Palantir and Sankar (which would likely have finished them as a government contractor).
I wonder how much Palantir paid to settle the lawsuit.
FWIW, we're doing it in the web, at bigger scale (GPUs in the client + cloud), and targeting Tableau & Excel levels of visual querying & flexibility: graphistry.com . A bit different and a longer topic, we're also more focused on modern data analysis & web workflows. Still only in closed pilots, but things don't have to be so bad :)
Am I hopelessly out of date?
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cajoFN6yjB0