Awk can do more than you think. Read The AWK Progamming Language.
Also:
gopher://hoi.st/1/dl and gopher://hoi.st/0/files/tgl.awk
make up a pretty complete language.
Don't think on AWK as a more powerful grep, you are missing a great mini-language.
Though having said that, any definition that separates awk from general programming languages like that could probably apply to shell syntax too.