As far as competing anecdata, I found gsheets absolutely much better for joining together multiple sheets of data. The lookups are so much less touchy simply because "it's all in the cloud" (as long as you have permissions).

With Excel you have to ensure the file is there, and readable, not tampered with, etc.

This allowed us to create better multi-workbook "apps" that have a bit more modularity - you could even embed sheets into a webpage as a view-only client.

In the end, Excel is good for us only for interoperability with external groups.