I haven't used PowerShell (since I don't use Windows), but when using the Unix shell interactively every so often I find myself in a situation where the data is too complex for a shell command to be able to process it, or else running into some corner case of missing functionality. Usually I end up piping into python -c, but that ends up pretty gross... if PowerShell isn't the answer, what is?

I wonder how far you could get by sort of plopping PowerShell onto the Unix shell and supporting both structured and text data.

(Incidentally, one such corner case is summing a list of numbers - this sounds like it should be a short command, but actually requires a complicated command line using awk.)