You really couldn't have asked for a better chain to demonstrate the validity of your point. Having been blinded by my own world view and biases in the past I sympathize with them but this is too funny not to have a little laugh at their expense.

I think what others might be demonstrated is that there isn't a reliance on what object Microsoft decides to ship to you, in *nix we can combine commands and builtins and get the information in the structure we need without having to wait 8 months for a system reboot (or worse a paid for upgrade) that will give us what we need.

Well, to be fair, what was demonstrated here was that people didn't actually extract the data after multiple edits and tries, regardless of what tools they had at their disposal.

I think the idea of an object pipeline is sound for precisely this reason, but I don't think it should be connected to any one language or platform.

First of all you are incorrect in your assumptions. You are reliant on the author of the tool in both cases. Just as there is no "UNIX Person" who decrees that all executables on UNIX must output text, there are vendors other than Microsoft who write software for Windows. You can write one too, it takes about 5 minutes to expose a powershell interface. And I'm not even a .NET developer. I write embedded software for a living.