Longtime user of Bloomberg here, both finance and coding experience.
You no longer need special hardware to use the terminal. In fact the special keys are just mappings to your F keys, and you'll know which one is which without the keyboard. They have a sticker strip if you really need it. BTW the keyboard is crap, the buttons aren't balanced meaning the keys kinda stick, making you type slower.
Data is the only reason you need this thing. It's truly comprehensive how many data sources are all accessible through a single syntax. I've traded single stocks, corporate bonds, CDS, ETFs, index options, equity options, commodity futures, government bonds, interest rate swaps, IR swaptions, FX, FX options, and so on. You can get a price chart for all of them just by typing in a code followed by "GP". Or you can get relevant news.
On the API side, it's pretty easy to pull the data you need from the terminal. There's .NET, python, java, etc libraries for you, with lots of examples. And just about every imaginable field is there.
Bloomberg Chat is useful in certain parts of the industry. You can have all your brokers set up with individual 1-on-1 chats, yet still blast out a quote request as in "USD 5Y, 100K dv01, please" and they will all see it without knowing how many people you're talking to. A lot of people are still trading in the stone age, and Bloomberg is certified for keeping records for this sort of thing. You might have heard about BBG Chat in the recent LIBOR trials.
There's also a whole pseudo-exchange functionality. Basically you can get approved to get prices from each broker, and then you can trade with them by sending them tickets via Bloomberg. I always thought that was crap, but some people like it, depends on their niche.
It's kinda ripe for disruption though. 24K is a lot for the basic package, and if you want to actually get the data, rather than just the interface into it, you have to pay the underlying provider. That gets pricy quite quickly. Also live data costs money, too, and it's not going to be fast. Unless you get the leased line (if you're in the City of London, it's not a problem), which is more money again. And not especially fast, since there's an extra hop. I'm not sure I buy the argument that finance professionals know how to use it, so bbg is entrenched. If you understand what you're looking for, you're not going to have a problem finding it on some other system. For a lot of things such as common stocks, Yahoo and Google are not going to have any less information.
I've never thought highly of bloomberg's customer service. At most they're useful for discovering functions that you don't know the shortcut for. When there's anything remotely complicated, they seem to do a huge internal goose chase and then eventually get back to you with "can't do it". Basically anything API related, the Help Help guys will not know what to do and end up waiting for a dev. Also the official account manager keeps changing and every time you get a new one they pester you to show you some obscure functionality.