Matlab is usually run as an ide with an interactive window (command line interpreter). Graphics are built in and interactive, you can interact with any number of graphics windows and with the command line at the same time (this is difficult to do in python numpy and matplotlib), and you can tweak the graphics windows from the command line to add GUI buttons, boxes, etc. This all comes built in to the most basic MATLAB commercial offering.

Ah, you meant the GUI, not specifically the handle graphics properies, and a GUI to manipulate the graphics.

This is all in development and almost completely functional in the current Octave dev branch. I hope our next upcoming release will satisfy you more.