If you were to build it from scratch with the idea of "shared nothing" applications similar to the unix model with text files, it's not that much more difficult with just about any sort of object or message broker. You could easily imagine a world with a dbus based "REPL"/shell, for instance. Or a different approach easily imaginable if you still want to focus on unix-style streams/files between processes would be something like BSON streams (thought it would still have some serialization/deserialization overhead).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerShell#Pipeline
>As with Unix pipelines, PowerShell pipelines can construct complex commands, using the | operator to connect stages. However, the PowerShell pipeline differs from Unix pipelines in that stages execute within the PowerShell runtime rather than as a set of processes coordinated by the operating system. Additionally, structured .NET objects, rather than byte streams, are passed from one stage to the next. Using objects and executing stages within the PowerShell runtime eliminates the need to serialize data structures, or to extract them by explicitly parsing text output. An object can also encapsulate certain functions that work on the contained data, which become available to the recipient command for use. For the last cmdlet in a pipeline, PowerShell automatically pipes its output object to the Out-Default cmdlet, which transforms the objects into a stream of format objects and then renders those to the screen.
I think the powershell approach is a good one here too: powershell commands output binary streams of objects rather than text and it is powershell itself that has several standard ways of human readable outputs, most of which are automatic (but easily tweaked with an extra pipe or two). Standard human readable forms are nice, and even standardized there's no need to rely on parsing them back out into objects because they are already passed as objects so they can focus a bit more on "pretty" over "parse-able" (such as including human useful things like ellisions `…` on long columns).