The centrifugal microfluidic platform has been a focus of academic and industrial research efforts for almost 40 years. Primarily targeting biomedical applications, a range of assays have been adapted on the system; however, the platform has found limited commercial success as a research or clinical tool. Nonetheless, new developments in centrifugal microfluidic technologies have the potential to establish wide-spread utilization of the platform. This paper presents an in-depth review of the centrifugal microfluidic platform, while highlighting recent progress in the field and outlining the potential for future applications. An overview of centrifugal microfluidic technologies is presented, including descriptions of advantages of the platform as a microfluidic handling system and the principles behind centrifugal fluidic manipulation. The paper also discusses a history of significant centrifugal microfluidic platform developments with an explanation of the evolution of the platform as it pertains to academia and industry. Lastly, we review the few centrifugal microfluidic-based sample-to-answer analysis systems shown to date and examine the challenges to be tackled before the centrifugal platform can be more broadly accepted as a new diagnostic platform. In particular, fully integrated, easy to operate, inexpensive and accurate microfluidic tools in the area of in vitro nucleic acid diagnostics are discussed.