The idea to tie it with .NET and COM+ on windows is the best a shell has ever done, though someone noted in another thread that it is an old idea from XEROX mainframes (not sure what the name was).

if you want to imagine this in terms of unix/linux - it would be something like having all libraries' APIs at disposal directly from a shell that passes structured objects. or python's REPL being more shell-usable or JVM having a shell that provides access to all classes in a click of ENTER.

major downside of pwsh is that you can feel it being slower than expected due to the way objects are passed around, but I really expect this will be solved at some point with future releases as PWSH as language is still being developed so some concepts and internal architecture decisions perhaps change a lot.

noshell is taking this idea to a fair level, but really, there is a reason to do some dev/devops work in PWSH because it will heavily impact all future shell development even if eventually superseded by something better.

[0] https://github.com/taviso/ctypes.sh

There's a very long road for any shell to get where pwsh is within MS's ecosystem (and even within .NET Core/GNU ecosystem). And I can easily imagine .NET Core wrapping DBUS and other COM-like facilities available for GNU OSs.

But what's the "business case" for iteration, conditionals, addition - apart from "everyone needs these"? Though these probably weren't the features he was thinking of.

You think iteration, conditionals, addition are not needed in shell scripts? It would be a very unusual position indeed.

Or could it be that you are not familiar with the expression "business case"? (Sorry if this is off base! but the word "mercenary"in your post also kind of points this way).

"Business case" has very little to do with business as commercial enterprise...