Maybe PowerShell would be the default command-line interface.
VS Code would be the default text editor.
.NET Core programming languages would be in the default SDK with the ability to seamlessly develop applications and push to Azure.
They could even include a way to run legacy Windows applications to maintain backward compatibility with all the previous Windows applications--a Windows subsystem for Linux.
Seriously though, if Microsoft created a full desktop Linux distro I would definitely want to try it.
You have no idea how much stuff expects the shell to behave like bourne shell.
Would you please elaborate what you mean by this statement?
The C shell (csh / tcsh) and the Korn shell (ksh) don't follow Bourne shell conventions and yet they work fine as login shells and script interpreters.
It seems logical that PowerShell could be further adapted to be more Unix-like with "read" and "print" functions that would attempt to bridge the object / plaintext divide similar to the "read" and "print" functions that are used in Lisp-like languages to convert between Lisp-like forms and plaintext.
If it were superior for containers, Windows containers wouldn't have withered on the vine.
.NET Core being truly cross-platform is pretty much an official acknowledgement by Microsoft that Windows is not the be-all and end-all. To use their words, they're "meeting developers where they live" instead of insisting that one size fits all, if that size is Windows.
Having worked with the Linux OS APIs and Win32 APIs, they both seem to have their advantages.