I agree - cmd.exe is quite usable, especially considering it's (almost) always available no matter what machine you use.

Why they're trying to replace it with Powershell rather than improving cmd.exe is silly, however.

I happen to like Powershell's idea, as it is the closest to the REPL experience on Xerox PARC inspired systems, we get to have on mainstream environments, by using objects and having access to the full set OS APIs on the scripting prompt.

However I do think it could have been made less verbose and dislike the ps1 extension, as the 1 (one) does not make sense.

Verbosity is something I tend to reserve for scripts (which should not rely on certain aliases existing). In the shell code I write approaches golfing idioms (perhaps inspired by the fact that I learned PowerShell by golfing in it). I think they've done a good job of having the verbose things readable and understandable, while also being able to shorten parameters as long as they remain unambiguous (and offering short aliases for cmdlets that are used all the time).

I heard they wanted to use the ps extension but that has long been used for PostScript, and though very few Windows users use PostScript files directly they still didn't want to step on those toes. Particularly, they were very cautious about using anything that looked like an existing file extension because they didn't want it to be an easy vector for malware to confuse users. ps1 doesn't step on any toes, at least, and looks weird enough to an average computer user that they might hesitate to double click one.

Might be, I would have prefered something like psh, but it is just nitpicking anyway.

Powershell has short default aliases for its verbose builtins, and most parameters have short versions as well.

For instance, "%" is an alias for ForEach-Object, "ls" for Get-ChildItem, etc. And you can of course define your own.

True, I was just speaking in general.