Yeah, it really is like that.

I've tried a couple of times to switch to things like IPython as my shell. And what nukes it every time is that while it may be better at the complicated commands I run maybe 1% of the time if you actually look at an unmodified history,

    cd("some dir")

is just too much insanely harder than

    cd som TAB ENTER

and I'm just smashing that TAB in a tight interactive loop to figure out how little I need to type.

It doesn't look like it when you're doing it once, but when you're doing it dozens of times a minute it adds up fast.