Maltego is a powerful intelligence gathering utility that allows simple and visual reconnaissance of a host, website, person, and a whole heck of a lot of other topics that can be extended with utilities available in the Transform Hub. I did some straightforward querying on my own infrastructure for technicalagain.com.
There are other utilities available to pull down some of the same information as Maltego, but none that I have come across that are as powerful outside the terminal and none are nearly so visual.
For large scale penetration testing with a team of testers, I definitely see the benefit Maltego offers in visually linking and storing as much information as possible about a target prior to moving into the threat modeling phase. I think of this akin to a team of detectives building out a whiteboard filled with as much information profiling the potential perps.