Stata is seen as a less powerful, more usable version and cheaper version of SAS; it's also comes off as less flexible than R when it comes to more complex queries. Companies with large teams can afford what statistician would see as a better tool; R is seen as the favored tool for the lone analyst with extensive background, or the hard-science academic. Stata on the other hand is mainly favored by social science practicionners and some more statistics-inclined marketing people, neither dwell Hacker News too much.

Stata is great as an excel replacement and has a decent library of pre-programmed statistical models. It's GUI based and targets applied researchers in economics etc. Unfortunately, extending any functions and defining your own models is quite a hassle unless you're familiar with mata (quirky matlab-esque syntax) and R's ecosystem is much more cutting edge.

Stata is great for drag and drop data manipulation from what I remember, an excellent excel replacement. Nothing beats dragging and dropping in variables and typing: reg y x1 x2 for immediate regression results.