For one thing, piping being mostly text-friendly is limiting in many scenarios I stumbled upon. A modern shell should allow arbitrary objects to be piped and processed, much like the functional programming paradigma. The UNIX idea was and still is wonderful, but we're past the text-only thing.

In any case, I feel (and I don't have tens of facts, I admit) we're dragged by the past for far too long. Others have documented their gripes with the current incarnation of Ops / sysadmin problems much better than I could. Here in HN (but I think years ago).