It absolutely can do text redirection, but also lots of other stuff. I'm more into functional programming in general, but the object-oriented stuff in Powershell is really well suited for the use case. Honestly in a lot of ways Powershell just solves shell scripting, almost any task can be accomplished by stringing a handful of separate modules together, just like bash is supposed to be.

Where did you get that idea from? It can do text, as well as various objects.

Perhaps I called it the wrong thing, but the simple > and < actions are what it was about, I believe. The friend complaining remarked that cmd could do what they wanted, but not powershell. This person is used to bash on unix-like systems.