One of the reasons I'm still afraid to use Powershell - its just not succint enough for normal day to day operations.

On the contrary, one of the first things I do on a Windows box is open up a powershell window. Especially on Win 8+, it's a lot easier to do "logoff" or "Stop-Computer -Force" or "Restart-Computer" than to try to navigate the mess of Metro to find the GUI menu options. Moving files around on the PS command line is much more efficient than using Explorer, just like bash/Terminal on the Ubuntu desktop. It's just a matter of getting used to it (and learning the different syntax from Unix shells).

PS cmdlets in generally are quite consistent: there is a [Verb]-[Noun] naming convention (eg, "Stop-Computer" above) and full tab completion, so if you forget the exact name of a cmdlet you can do Get-[tab] and cycle through every Get-* cmdlet that exists. Even command line switches tab complete, just type a hyphen and then you can tab-cycle through every command line switch that particular cmdlet supports. There's also Remote Powershell, which is like SSH but also built-in. I can sit in a Powershell window and connect to a Windows server anywhere just like SSH on Linux, or even compose a script block, assign it to a variable, then send it over the wire to be executed remotely (or to a group of machines in a foreach loop). It's pretty slick, and all this is built into the shell--no third-party tools required.

I'm not a big fan of MS, but I'm willing to give them kudos on the rare occasion that they build something nice. Powershell has it's quirks like anything, but it's a damn nice piece of engineering and a godsend to anyone who has to administer Windows boxes. Why anyone would continue with the anachronism of (essentially DOS) cmd.exe is beyond me.

I beg to differ, and not only because I code-golf in PowerShell. Aliases and the ability to shorten arguments while they're unambiguous both are features that have no use for scripts, but are very handy for an interactive shell. I never type things like

    Get-ChildItem -Path ~ -Recurse

if I can help it, instead it almost always is something like

    ls ~ -r

I guess -Recurse only ever appears there if I hit [⇄] for parameter completion.

Sadly there are far too many people who only know bash and see straightforward conversions of VBScript into PowerShell and think the language sucks or is too verbose.

Like all software it will be read far more often than it is written. It is optimised for that common use case.

Not my experience with batch files / shell scripts, but that's hardly any evidence.

They are read far more often -- by a machine.