> Also, if someone here has an answer: Why in the design of Windows aren't programs installed or symlinked in the PATH by default? I guess that was a design choice somewhere along the history of Windows/DOS. Is there a reason?

This get's to the real issue of what makes powershell so horrible. It's not that anyone loves bash scripts, it's that there are a tonne of great utilities that bash script tie together. Windows doesn't have this.