This works really well to illustrate most of these points: http://i.imgur.com/ZY8dKpA.gif
non-gif version: https://speakerdeck.com/cherdarchuk/clear-off-the-table
And the rest of these: https://speakerdeck.com/cherdarchuk (Pie Chart is my personal favorite :))
I found clients love having their questions in form of 'Y' in leading columns before the data. Such as, `Products shipped more than 250,000`, 'Products still in stock', 'Products in transit'. It allows them to quickly filter the data more tailed to what they're interested in.
The biggest abuse of tables I see (and have often been the implementor of) is showing too much information for too many workflows that are slightly related. I'm sure most of us here have seen what happens when we add "just one more column" over and over again until is becomes that giant abomination with dynamic sorting (some even do it client side) and a million filters that force people to click 20 times just to do their job.
I think it causes a lot of maintenance issues as well, it's much easy to work with many smaller and more task focused displays than it is to work with the big "do everything" ones.