Passing strongly typed objects between processes seems better than text and streams, if only for auto complete.

That part is great. The problem with Powershell is that Windows doesn't have a culture of using the shell in general or it being an area developers should be good at, whereas Unix inherits half a century of a shell being the primary means to control a system. This shows painfully any time you try to use PowerShell seriously outside of Microsoft's core enterprise IT management – documentation is non-existent, hard to find, out of date, incomplete, etc. while many applications either don't support it at all or expose only limited functionality, and so forth.

I think Niels had it exactly backwards: PowerShell is like taking your bike from the Tour de France and trying to ride through a rural area with no roads. All of the advanced technology doesn't help if you're trying to do something which just isn't commonly done there.

The thing which I think will change that is Azure – almost any time I see someone mention using PowerShell for real work, it involves Azure and that seems likely to continue improving as people start doing the hybrid cloud model. It's one thing to click around in a GUI when you periodically setup a few gigantic servers or deploy every 3 months but it's quite a different world when you are talking about running a dozen cloud servers for 3 hours.

The good news is that there is a Microsoft directive that major Microsoft software should come powershell admin tools.

I think a lot of config gui's now just execute powershell underneath.

Most of the stuff that comes out of azure UI just runs powershell stuff. The release flow for new features tends to be powershell private preview -> general availability of commandlets -> UI full release. Most of the Azure stack has extra features that are never really ported to the UI.

Hopefully they'll be able to shift the culture to the point where enterprise IT managers start writing that into purchase requirements. That could make lives better for a lot of Windows admins very quickly.

I don't like the powershell, and even I know that's an absurdly unfair bias.

Very true, but I suspect you're mapping them the opposite way.