Now that it exists there are users, but when people were hoping for a modern or more portable replacement for DOS batch files I'm not sure this is what they had in mind.

Powershell In Action covers a bit of the history and decision making around powershell; interesting stuff.

Ultimately, given that powershell was initially targeted at systems admins/engineers and that Windows is highly object-oriented(in contrast to Linux's text streams), I believe Powershell was a apt development. Having done plenty of systems engineering across linux and Windows it seems to fit the needs of Windows pretty well; a fantastically unique shell that wouldn't have existed if not for Windows.

Think of it as a replacement for vbscript instead, with a commandline.