Don't wanna get all Unix-macho here, but the regular command line is also pretty safe when you're just launching applications and doing things equivalent to the location bar. It gets dangerous for only a specific subset of administrative commands such as rm, mv, apt- which provide different functionality anyway.

That said. you can get burnt clobbering important files with output redirection. It's a good idea to enable the "noclobbler" setting in Bash like so:

  set -o noclobber

It's saved me plenty of times from deleting important partially process data.

The new ones aren't dangerous because you can't actually do anything with them. As soon as I can send an email (or affect the outside world in any way) from the location bar, it becomes just as dangerous as the unix command line.

  cd /
  rm *

essentially renders your machine useless. Surely it would be easy to make it less dangerous than this.

Of course it would be, my point is that less dangerous necessarily means less powerful. Though I'd agree that there are cases where the trade off is desirable, like `rm -rf /`.

you can pry bash from my cold, dead hands.

Try taking zsh away from me and my cold, dead jaw will reanimate and seek your throat.