> For my research I used PyQt/PySide to build lots of UI components for controlling my lab equipment, visualizing my data and running code in an interactive way. While doing this kind of thing using a native toolkit (MFC, GTK) would have been possible, it would probably have been much difficult and time-consuming.

Neat. What kind of equipment were you controlling with? Is any of your code available? (I'm doing the same these days)