He specifically mentions PowerShell. Compared to what is available for UNIX-like systems PowerShell may very well be terrible (I haven't used it). There is more to the command line experience than the shell itself.
Emotions aside, PowerShell is definitely one of the most innovative shell adaptations in the past few years. Some group in MS tried really hard to take things to the next level.
Now whether that level is where people want to go-- well, that's hard to say. It's difficult to judge "success" for this sort of a thing. How much usage is because MS is pushing it and how much is because it scratches some itches?
For me, it's slow to start up, and not overly useful for my everyday tasks. Still, most of the demos are impressive and the idea of piping objects around rather than raw text/files seems like an idea with a lot of potential.
Again, the shell itself isn't really the issue. Can I SSH into a Windows box without third party software? How are the command line utilities for things like SQL Server? Are there any utilities included similar to common UNIX tools such as grep? Is there a command line file editor?
Isn't PowerShell only available to Vista users? That's a small minority of Windows users. Besides, there's not much emphasis on it either so it still feels as if the command line is sort of second class in Windows.
I've had a PC running Vista for a while now (it was cheaper than XP and I need Windows for music software) and I couldn't even tell you how to start PowerShell. I don't even know if PowerShell is different from the old Start->Run->cmd. That one looks the same as it ever did.
To be honest, the thought of poking around in PowerShell never even occurred to me because the Windows command line has never been of much use in the past. That's likely part of the problem. The inferiority of the Windows command line is very deeply ingrained in users. Still, even if a user does bother to figure it out it's still very clear that pointing and clicking is heavily favored over typing commands on a Windows system.
As far as I can tell PowerShell seems much more geared for sys admins creating scripts that run automatically than for user interaction. Based on what I've read about PowerShell, I would consider it to be more similar to something like Perl than a bash shell.
Care to explain that some? I've only poked around a little with PowerShell, but it freaking looks like it could do anything. It's modular, extensible, threaded, and has this huge library base.
I'm not defending -- I don't know that much about it except my initial impressions. Just curious as to why you would say that.
It can do anything in the same way that any other Turing complete programming language can, but that's not really enough.
As a shell, it's stuck in the same old Windows command line window that command prompt has always been, with all the problems that entails - no real resizing or decent mouse selection/copy and paste and so on.
As a shell, you want terse and concise hacking, it should be optimised for finger friendliness and oneliners that you aren't going to come back to. Powershell is not. It's wordy and verbose, C# style. It makes things complex because it's not easy to find what you're looking for. Object piping might be nice, but not when you have to get all files and pipe them into a get-modified-date thing and pipe the date objects into a date-to-text object instead of ls -...
As a programming language, it's seriously ugly. It could have been VBScript slid towards Python, instead it's C# slid towards Perl. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/10/18/emit-xml... from the official powershell blog from the main man behind powershell. $Ugh -*!
So, he doesn't know about PowerShell.