I think your conversation metaphor is good, but in a GUI the answer can be richer and interactive. A CLI can only manipulate text, a GUI can manipulate text where necessary and use a better medium (images, graphs, tables) where necessary.
CLI does not need to manipulate text only necessarily, see the command line in AutoCAD for example.
But yes, GUI in many cases is a better way, I wouldn't want to have cli-only Photoshop-like app (or even cli-only CAD modeller). The point is to recognize effectivity of both approaches for a given problem, at the given abstraction level.
There would be no point in micromanaging the car using a limited vocabulary.
Sometimes it is better to mass delete files with a find, grep and rm, sometimes an auto-filtered search and cmd+a cmd+delete is better.
To me, using CLI is like having a conversation, with much richer vocabulary, than GUI. That's just pointing at things.