They definitely use it in academia; it gives poor PhD students a nice way to work with GIS data (sure, you can pay for a student ArcGIS license but then good luck after graduation..)

One thing I wish QGIS had though is a command line interface. In order to rerun studies or results, I would like to be able to rerun data transformations and so on, but the current mouse-based way doesn't help there (if you have a loooot of pacience, you can also script it in python, but it would be insane to port every mouse click and action into a script).

QGIS indeed has this in the form of a Python interface you can use to write your own code:

https://docs.qgis.org/2.8/en/docs/user_manual/processing/scr...

The wonderful thing about the processing framework is how it gives bindings over several other GIS OSS tools like gdal.

In fact, you can run scripts developed using the Python interface without having to open the QGIS GUI at all. See the below gis.stackexchange question for a snippet on how to do this:

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/152762/error-algorit...

Like Autodesk, Matlab, etc., Esri has a very clever marketing and gives away ArcGIS for free for students. I followed university courses in geomatics and ArcGIS was the de facto tool for assignments. We all got a free 1 year license. But I always preferred QGIS because it works better with PostGIS. And also because it is awesome and FOSS. The assistants giving ArcGIS lessons all used QGIS (with PostGIS and Python) for their real research projects.

First shots for free - this really should be a forbidden practice.

I used QGIS extensively in my dissertation research and I actually prefer it over ArcGIS. I found ArcGIS unintuitive and clunky, whereas it was much easier to figure out things in QGIS. QGIS is not the greatest UI ever, but ArcGIS is miserable (for me anyway).

Completely agree though, it would be really nice to have a proper QGIS interface library.

> One thing I wish QGIS had though is a command line interface.

You can do lots of geodata transformation using the wonderful GDAL suite and lots of QGIS' transformations are just wrappers around it anyway - in fact QGIS often tells you the exact GDAL command it is going to run (and then conveniently loads the results in the GUI).

You can also use the model builder to create a graph/node based workflow.

Its presence is growing in the commercial and govt spaces. Oddly enough, I actually see it used more in those than in academia. Definitely a growing presence in all three though.